[tlack]

Always surprising to click through a link on HN and discover it is one's own work. For a time I was very interested in lightweight array-based implementations of common data structures and this one seemed particularly handy.

[spenczar5]

It sounds a little like it didn’t work out as well as you hoped. How did it fare?

I am interested because I have some scientific software (astrodynamics - propagating orbits in space) that would really benefit from a cache-friendly tree, and this seemed promising.

[ninepoints]

It does? Feels like an O(n) scan every time you need to query the children of a node is a nonstarter for most applications (the readme is strangely optimistic about this point). Plenty of cache friendly tree implementations out there, and this one seems actually cache hostile with few benefits in my mind aside from ease of implementation.

Also, I write a lot of code that runs on a gpu, and the claim that this tree is somehow gpu friendly I find particularly dubious.

[tlack]

I still like that setup for using trees in low level languages.

But personally I’ve been working at higher levels of the stack the last few years, where these kinds of decisions seem less important.

And on another level, it seems like coders in general aren’t that interested in vector oriented languages and techniques which makes their study somewhat isolating.

[runeblaze]

FWIW I worked also on scientific software (phylogenetics, which is all about biological evolutionary trees) and the tree structure is like Atree (https://github.com/RuneBlaze/internode/blob/main/src/tree.rs...).

It does help (roughly ~5x vs. pointer-chasing trees, probably can be further optimized) for my workload, but at the same time quite some time was spent just making sure the tree is correct.

[loxias]

I'm interested in the same stuff/area. There's a lot of great results to read, check out cache-oblivious B-trees by Dr. Demaine (or honestly anything by him.) This link is a good distillation of some of the concepts. https://algorithmica.org/en/eytzinger

I'm _also_ interested in scientific software, but that's more a hobby than a job. =)

For propagating a large number of orbits in space, I'm really curious what the Correct (tm) numerical algorithm is, mind sharing more? I love that space right at the intersection of lots of math + need to understand how computers really work. Once upon a time I implemented fast multipole method for the n-body problem, but I certainly don't claim to deeply understand it, anymore. :)

[8372049]

Friendly heads up, "pseudo" is frequently misspelled "psuedo" in the readme.