Although Go doesn’t have generics, we deserve to have reuseable general algorithms. iter helps improving Go code in several ways:
- Some simple loops are unlikely to be wrong or inefficient, but calling algorithm instead will make the code more concise and easier to comprehend. Such as AllOf, FindIf, Accumulate.
- Some algorithms are not complicated, but it is not easy to write them correctly. Reusing code makes them easier to reason for correctness. Such as Shuffle, Sample, Partition.
- STL also includes some complicated algorithms that may take hours to make it correct. Implementing it manually is impractical. Such as NthElement, StablePartition, NextPermutation.
- The implementation in the library contains some imperceptible performance optimizations. For instance, MinmaxElement is done by taking two elements at a time. In this way, the overall number of comparisons is significantly reduced.
There are alternative libraries have similar goals, such as gostl, gods and go-stp. What makes iter unique is:
- Non-intrusive. Instead of introducing new containers,
itertends to reuse existed containers in Go (slice, string, list.List, etc.) and use iterators to adapt them to algorithms. - Full algorithms (>100). It includes almost all algorithms come before C++17. Check the Full List.
