p5-Tree-Node

Memory-efficient tree nodes in Perl

This module implements a memory-efficient node type (for trees, skip lists and similar data structures) for Perl. You may ask "Why bother implementing an ordered structure such as a tree when Perl has hashes built-in?" Since Perl is optimized for speed over memory usage, hashes (and lists) use a lot of memory. So the purpose of this package is to provide a simple low-level Node class which can be used as a base class to implement various kinds of tree structures. Each node has a key/value pair and a variable number of "children" pointers. How nodes are organized or the algorithm used to organize them is for you to implement. There is no Pure-perl version because this package was written to overcome limitations of Perl.