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<div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both">
<a name="unordered.rationale"></a><a class="link" href="rationale.html" title="Implementation Rationale"> Implementation Rationale</a>
</h2></div></div></div>
<p>
The intent of this library is to implement the unordered containers in the
draft standard, so the interface was fixed. But there are still some implementation
decisions to make. The priorities are conformance to the standard and portability.
</p>
<p>
The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_table" target="_top">wikipedia article
on hash tables</a> has a good summary of the implementation issues for
hash tables in general.
</p>
<a name="unordered.rationale.data_structure"></a><h3>
<a name="id3030621"></a>
<a class="link" href="rationale.html#unordered.rationale.data_structure">Data Structure</a>
</h3>
<p>
By specifying an interface for accessing the buckets of the container the standard
pretty much requires that the hash table uses chained addressing.
</p>
<p>
It would be conceivable to write a hash table that uses another method. For
example, it could use open addressing, and use the lookup chain to act as a
bucket but there are a some serious problems with this:
</p>
<div class="itemizedlist"><ul class="itemizedlist" type="disc">
<li class="listitem">
The draft standard requires that pointers to elements aren't invalidated,
so the elements can't be stored in one array, but will need a layer of
indirection instead - losing the efficiency and most of the memory gain,
the main advantages of open addressing.
</li>
<li class="listitem">
Local iterators would be very inefficient and may not be able to meet the
complexity requirements.
</li>
<li class="listitem">
There are also the restrictions on when iterators can be invalidated. Since
open addressing degrades badly when there are a high number of collisions
the restrictions could prevent a rehash when it's really needed. The maximum
load factor could be set to a fairly low value to work around this - but
the standard requires that it is initially set to 1.0.
</li>
<li class="listitem">
And since the standard is written with a eye towards chained addressing,
users will be surprised if the performance doesn't reflect that.
</li>
</ul></div>
<p>
So chained addressing is used.
</p>
<p>
For containers with unique keys I store the buckets in a single-linked list.
There are other possible data structures (such as a double-linked list) that
allow for some operations to be faster (such as erasing and iteration) but
the possible gain seems small compared to the extra memory needed. The most
commonly used operations (insertion and lookup) would not be improved at all.
</p>
<p>
But for containers with equivalent keys a single-linked list can degrade badly
when a large number of elements with equivalent keys are inserted. I think
it's reasonable to assume that users who choose to use <code class="computeroutput"><span class="identifier">unordered_multiset</span></code>
or <code class="computeroutput"><span class="identifier">unordered_multimap</span></code> do so
because they are likely to insert elements with equivalent keys. So I have
used an alternative data structure that doesn't degrade, at the expense of
an extra pointer per node.
</p>
<p>
This works by adding storing a circular linked list for each group of equivalent
nodes in reverse order. This allows quick navigation to the end of a group
(since the first element points to the last) and can be quickly updated when
elements are inserted or erased. The main disadvantage of this approach is
some hairy code for erasing elements.
</p>
<a name="unordered.rationale.number_of_buckets"></a><h3>
<a name="id3030754"></a>
<a class="link" href="rationale.html#unordered.rationale.number_of_buckets">Number of Buckets</a>
</h3>
<p>
There are two popular methods for choosing the number of buckets in a hash
table. One is to have a prime number of buckets, another is to use a power
of 2.
</p>
<p>
Using a prime number of buckets, and choosing a bucket by using the modulus
of the hash function's result will usually give a good result. The downside
is that the required modulus operation is fairly expensive.
</p>
<p>
Using a power of 2 allows for much quicker selection of the bucket to use,
but at the expense of loosing the upper bits of the hash value. For some specially
designed hash functions it is possible to do this and still get a good result
but as the containers can take arbitrary hash functions this can't be relied
on.
</p>
<p>
To avoid this a transformation could be applied to the hash function, for an
example see <a href="http://www.concentric.net/~Ttwang/tech/inthash.htm" target="_top">Thomas
Wang's article on integer hash functions</a>. Unfortunately, a transformation
like Wang's requires knowledge of the number of bits in the hash value, so
it isn't portable enough. This leaves more expensive methods, such as Knuth's
Multiplicative Method (mentioned in Wang's article). These don't tend to work
as well as taking the modulus of a prime, and the extra computation required
might negate efficiency advantage of power of 2 hash tables.
</p>
<p>
So, this implementation uses a prime number for the hash table size.
</p>
<a name="unordered.rationale.equality_operators"></a><h3>
<a name="id3030821"></a>
<a class="link" href="rationale.html#unordered.rationale.equality_operators">Equality operators</a>
</h3>
<p>
<code class="computeroutput"><span class="keyword">operator</span><span class="special">==</span></code>
and <code class="computeroutput"><span class="keyword">operator</span><span class="special">!=</span></code>
are not included in the standard, but I've added them as I think they could
be useful and can be implemented fairly efficiently. They are specified differently
to the other standard containers, comparing keys using the equality predicate
rather than <code class="computeroutput"><span class="keyword">operator</span><span class="special">==</span></code>.
</p>
<p>
It's also different to the proposal <a href="http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2009/n2944.pdf" target="_top">n2944</a>.
which uses the equality operators for the whole of <code class="computeroutput"><span class="identifier">value_type</span></code>.
This implementation just uses the key equality function for the key, and <code class="computeroutput"><span class="identifier">mapped_type</span></code>'s equality operator in <code class="computeroutput"><span class="identifier">unordered_map</span></code> and <code class="computeroutput"><span class="identifier">unordered_multimap</span></code>
for the mapped part of the element.
</p>
<p>
Also, in <code class="computeroutput"><span class="identifier">unordered_multimap</span></code>,
the mapped values for a group of elements with equivalent keys are only considered
equal if they are in the same order, in n2944 they just need to be a permutation
of each other. Since the order of elements with equal keys is now defined to
be stable, it seems to me that their order can be considered part of the container's
value.
</p>
<a name="unordered.rationale.active_issues_and_proposals"></a><h3>
<a name="id3030958"></a>
<a class="link" href="rationale.html#unordered.rationale.active_issues_and_proposals">Active Issues
and Proposals</a>
</h3>
<a name="unordered.rationale.c__0x_allocators"></a><h4>
<a name="id3030980"></a>
<a class="link" href="rationale.html#unordered.rationale.c__0x_allocators">C++0x allocators</a>
</h4>
<p>
Recent drafts have included an overhaul of the allocators, but this was dependent
on concepts which are no longer in the standard. <a href="http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2009/n2946.pdf" target="_top">n2946</a>
attempts to respecify them without concepts. I'll try to implement this (or
an appropriate later version) in a future version of boost, possibly changed
a little to accomodate non-C++0x compilers.
</p>
<a name="unordered.rationale.swapping_containers_with_unequal_allocators"></a><h4>
<a name="id3031017"></a>
<a class="link" href="rationale.html#unordered.rationale.swapping_containers_with_unequal_allocators">Swapping
containers with unequal allocators</a>
</h4>
<p>
It isn't clear how to swap containers when their allocators aren't equal. This
is <a href="http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/lwg-active.html#431" target="_top">Issue
431: Swapping containers with unequal allocators</a>. This has been resolved
with the new allocator specification, so this should be fixed when support
is added.
</p>
<a name="unordered.rationale.are_insert_and_erase_stable_for_unordered_multiset_and_unordered_multimap_"></a><h4>
<a name="id3031056"></a>
<a class="link" href="rationale.html#unordered.rationale.are_insert_and_erase_stable_for_unordered_multiset_and_unordered_multimap_">Are
insert and erase stable for unordered_multiset and unordered_multimap?</a>
</h4>
<p>
It wan't specified if <code class="computeroutput"><span class="identifier">unordered_multiset</span></code>
and <code class="computeroutput"><span class="identifier">unordered_multimap</span></code> preserve
the order of elements with equivalent keys (i.e. if they're stable under <code class="computeroutput"><span class="identifier">insert</span></code> and <code class="computeroutput"><span class="identifier">erase</span></code>).
Since <a href="http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2008/n2691.pdf" target="_top">n2691</a>
it's been specified that they do and this implementation follows that.
</p>
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<td align="right"><div class="copyright-footer">Copyright © 2003, 2004 Jeremy B. Maitin-Shepard<br>Copyright © 2005-2008 Daniel
James<p>
Distributed under the Boost Software License, Version 1.0. (See accompanying
file LICENSE_1_0.txt or copy at <a href="http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt" target="_top">http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt</a>)
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