Preliminary release of the C Data Structure Library

Now that I've got two data structures down solid, I went ahead and worked out the release process. The 0.1-alpha release of the C Data Structure Library is now available on the SourceForge website. A separate package was uploaded with the Doxygen docs (for those who don't want to build them themselves). Please download it and try it out!

To prepare for release I got the code compiling as C89, C99, and C++, and got it building under Windows in Visual Studio 2005 and 2008. Interestingly, the performance comparison of list versus doubly-linked lists is quite one-sided on Windows: the doubly-linked list is much slower, for some reason (perhaps a more expensive allocator). It's a little tricky asserting that the .vcproj/.sln files are public domain, since they're partly boilerplate generated by the tools, but I stripped out any of the content that didn't serve a functional purpose.

What next? Lots to do. Probably the most painfully needed is some kind of string. Strings are pretty straightforward until I start worrying about encoding - at the very least UTF8 and UTF16 support would be handy. Beyond that is associative array data structures, like hash tables, some kind of cache-friendly self-balancing search tree, and a simple association list for small dictionaries. What about after that? Well, I look to other libraries for inspiration.

• Bit arrays.
  
• There's a deque data structure that uses a dynamic array like a circular buffer.
• Priority queues (a buffer tree or funnel heap is a good candidate for cache efficiency).
  
• Stacks and queues, simpler interfaces on top of existing structures.
• Sets supporting union and intersection.
• Ropes.
• Disjoint-set data structures.
  
• Maybe collections for parallel programming? This could be hard to do in a platform-independent way.

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