s02190058/avl

testing generics in Go

Generic performance in Go

I was interested to see how to implement generalized types in Go 1.18. I also wanted to compare their performance with the implementation for specific types. So I wrote a simple AVl tree (generic, int and string version) and a benchmark that adds elements to an empty tree and then cleans it completely.

Results

int tree:

size	certain implementation performance (ns/op)	generic performance (ns/op)
32	2750	2936
1024	247502	241176
32768	15153595	13542495

string tree:

size	certain implementation performance (ns/op)	generic performance (ns/op)
32	4279	4032
1024	366448	337257
32768	23586607	20246445

Summary

Implementation through generalized types does not lose at all to implementations with specific types. On my computer, generics work faster on almost all amounts of data. Using square brackets to specify type parameters is a bit unusual, but also convenient.