Support Native Map Type

Someone recently commented on an old Ramda issue about supporting the native Map type and it got me thinking whether we should do so in Sanctuary. I’m not quite sure how that would look given that the StrMap type we have is more specific that the general JS type but I’m interested to hear everyone’s thoughts.

[scott-christopher]

I’ve pushed some code to https://github.com/sanctuary-js/sanctuary-set/tree/pre-0.0.1 which contains an initial pass of implementing two variants of immutable sets, one based on balanced AVL trees and the other is specialised for Int32 values using Patricia tries. It is severely lacking in documentation and the code could do with a good clean-up and sanity check, though I figured it would be good to get some eyes over it sooner rather than later.

I’ve also got some Map versions of the same implementations which I’ll tidy up a bit over the coming days and push up to the other repository.

[scott-christopher]

Is there a reason we cannot use a similar approach for externally visible maps and sets in Sanctuary?

The only issue I see is that we would probably want to treat it as an immutable structure, which will end up with a bunch of instance cloning to work around the underlying mutable structure.

I’ve a got a bit of time free over the next week or two and was already looking at implementing some persistent Map and Set types to get a better understanding of a paper I saw recently, so providing that goes to plan they could potentially live under the Sanctuary banner if there’s interest.