# 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.