[Chandler-dev] [Sum] The Great Architecture Discussion of 2007

[Andi Vajda]

On Wed, 10 Oct 2007, Phillip J. Eby wrote:

>>> I mean that by implementing a skiplist *inside* of BerkeleyDB rather than 
>>> using a native BerkeleyDB structure, we're adding an "interpretation" 
>>> layer there.
>> 
>> What is the native Berkeley DB structure that corresponds to a skiplist ?
>
> A BTree.  And the native Python equivalent is a list.  You may recall that at 
> one time, I compared the performance of the skiplist implementation with a 
> simple Python list object, and found that for lists of up to 50,000 items, 
> Python lists were faster -- often significantly faster.  This is another good 
> example of where we are reinventing wheels in Python code that somebody 
> already wrote a mature implementation of in C.

I don't see how a Berkeley DB B-Tree gives me positional access. Nor do I see 
how I can sparsely load and persist a Python list. This is why I implemented 
skiplists. Python ? I re-wrote the skiplist implementation in C years ago.

Andi..