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Swift Data Structure and Algorithms

You're reading from   Swift Data Structure and Algorithms Implement Swift structures and algorithms natively

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Product type Paperback
Published in Nov 2016
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781785884504
Length 286 pages
Edition 1st Edition
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Author (1):
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Mario Eguiluz Alebicto Mario Eguiluz Alebicto
Author Profile Icon Mario Eguiluz Alebicto
Mario Eguiluz Alebicto
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Toc

Table of Contents (10) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Walking Across the Playground FREE CHAPTER 2. Working with Commonly Used Data Structures 3. Standing on the Shoulders of Giants 4. Sorting Algorithms 5. Seeing the Forest through the Tree 6. Advanced Searching Methods 7. Graph Algorithms 8. Performance and Algorithm Efficiency 9. Choosing the Perfect Algorithm

Circular buffer


A circular buffer is a fixed-size data structure that contains two indices, a head index and a tail index that connects to the beginning of the buffer. When the buffer is full, the head index will loop back to 0. Their main purpose is to accept incoming data until their capacity is full, and then overwrite older elements.

Circular buffers are useful when you need a FIFO data structure. They are similar to the queue data structure, except the tail index wraps to the front of the buffer to form a circular data structure.

Since circular buffers are a fixed size, as they become full the older elements will be overwritten. Because of their fixed size, it is more efficient to use an array data structure internally to store the data instead of a linked list. Generally, once you create a circular buffer, the size will not increase, so the buffer memory size should stay pretty static. An implementation could include the capability to resize the buffer and move the existing elements...

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