[trjordan]

There's something about this that's unsatisfying to me. Like it's just a trivia trick.

My first read of this was "this seems impossible." You're asked to move bits around without any working space, because you're not allowed to allocate memory. I guess you could interpret this pedantically in C/C++ land and decide that they mean no additional usage of the heap, so there's other places (registers, stack, etc.) to store bits. The title is "in constant memory" so I guess I'm allowed some constant memory, which is vaguely at odds with "can you do this without allocating additional memory?" in the text.

But even with that constraint ... std::rotate allocates memory! It'll throw std::bad_alloc when it can't. It's not using it for the core algorithm (... which only puts values on the heap ... which I guess is not memory ...), but that function can 100% allocate new memory in the right conditions.

It's cool you can do this simply with a couple rotates, but it feels like a party trick.

[taeric]

To be fair, it originates from a time when memory was tighter. Is discussed with some motivating text in Programming Pearls. I can't remember the context, but I think it was in a text editor. I can look it up, if folks want some of that context here.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

I did something similar back in the day to support block-move for an editor running on a memory constrained 8-bit micro (BBC Micro). It had to be done in-place since there was no guarantee you'd have enough spare memory to use a temporary buffer, and also more efficient to move each byte once rather than twice (in/out of temp buffer).

[osullivj]

Also useful for cache locality, a more recent trend. But I guess that's just another slighlty diff case of tight mem; this time in the cache rather than RAM generally.

[wakawaka28]

The problem seems less arbitrary if the chunks being rotated are large enough. Implicit in the problem is that any method that would require additional memory to be allocated would probably require memory proportional to the sizes of stuff being swapped. That could be unmanageable.

As for whether std::rotate() uses allocations, I can't say without looking. But I know it could be implemented without allocations. Maybe it's optimal in practice to use extra space. I don't think a method involving reversal of items is generally going to be the fastest. It might be the only practical one in some cases or else better for other reasons.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

No - std::rotate is just doing this with in-place swaps.

Say you have "A1 A2 B1" and want to rotate (swap) adjacent blocks A1-A2 and B1, where WLOG the smaller of these is B1, and A1 is same size as B1.

What you do is first swap B1 with A1 (putting B1 into it's final place).

B1 A2 A1

Now recurse to swap A2 and A1, giving the final result:

B1 A1 A2

Swapping same-size blocks (which is what this algorithm always chooses to do) is easy since you can just iterate though both swapping corresponding pairs of elements. Each block only gets moved once since it gets put into it's final place.

[hacker_homie]

You are thinking of std::swap, std::rotate does throw bad_alloc

[SkiFire13]

> But even with that constraint ... std::rotate allocates memory! It'll throw std::bad_alloc when it can't.

This feels kinda crazy. Is there a reason why this is the case?

[quuxplusone]

That's only for the parallel overload. The ordinary sequential overload doesn't allocate: the only three ordinary STL algorithms that allocate are stable_sort, stable_partition, and (ironically) inplace_merge.