lander/TRIE.md

17 lines
701 B
Markdown
Raw Permalink Normal View History

# Trie design
The underlying data structure is based on a combination of a ternary and a
Patricia trie.
* Nodes are classic ternary trie nodes, meaning each node contains a binary
search tree
* Each node can define a skip, like a Patricia trie, of at most 8 characters.
These skipped characters are stored directly in the structs defining the
nodes.
* While the add function relies on the fact that the input is a NULL-terminated
C string, the trie itself does not store any NULL bytes.
The goal of this datastructure is to be as optimized as possible for search
operations with short (usually < 8 characters) keys, as this is by far the most
common operation for a URL shortener/pastebin.