Programming Flix

Chains and Vectors

In addition to immutable Lists, Flix also supports immutable Chains and Vectors.

The following table illustrates the performance trade-offs between lists, chains, and vectors:

When to use List, Chain, or Vector?:

• The List data structure should be the default choice as it is simple and well-known.
• The Vector data structure is an excellent choice when the size of a collection is fixed and/or when fast random access is required.
• The Chain data structure is more rarely used, but shines when fast appends are required.

Chains

A Chain[t] is an immutable linked sequence of elements.

The Chain[t] data type is defined as:

enum Chain[t] {
    case Empty
    case One(t)
    case Chain(Chain[t], Chain[t])
}

The data structure supports O(1) append because we can construct a new chain from two existing chains using the Chain constructor (or more appropriately using Chain.append).

We can build chains using Chain.empty, Chain.singleton, Chain.cons, and Chain.append.

For example, we can write:

let c = Chain.cons(1, Chain.empty());
println(c)

which prints Chain#{1} when compiled and executed.

Vectors

A Vector[t] is an immutable fixed-length sequence of contiguous elements of type t.

Flix has support for Vector literals. For example, we can write:

Vector#{1, 2, 3}

which creates a vector of length three with the elements: 1, 2, and 3.

Vectors support fast random access with the Vector.get operation:

let v = Vector#{1, 2, 3};
println(Vector.get(2, v))

which prints 3 when compiled and executed.

Warning: Indexing into a vector beyond its bounds will panic the program.

Vectors support many operations. For example, we can map a function over a vector:

let v = Vector#{1, 2, 3};
Vector.map(x -> x + 1, v)

evaluates to Vector#{2, 3, 4}.