N-gated Hacker NewsApr 19
🎩✨ Behold the majestic skiplist: the data structure nobody asked for but everyone pretends to need! 🤡 This article bravely navigates a sea of #buzzwords and sales pitches, leaving readers wondering if the true purpose of skiplists is to skip the point entirely. 🚀
https://antithesis.com/blog/2026/skiptrees/ #skiplist #datastructure #techhumor #programming #satire #HackerNews #ngated
What are skiplists good for?

An exotic data structure and a whole lot of JOINs.

AiniriandAug 1, 2025

Just did some benchmarking on data structures in Rust and was surprised to see that SkipList is slower than Vector and HashMap for search operations!

Insertion times are pretty good, but searching is where the SkipList falls behind.

If you're curious about this too, check out my little demo project: https://github.com/sh4ka/skiplist-demo

It's a simple benchmarking program that inserts 1 million elements and then searches for one of them.

#Rustlang #DataStructures #SkipList #Vector #HashMap #Programming

GitHub - sh4ka/skiplist-demo: Rust benchmark comparing `SkipList` vs `Vec` (binary search) vs `HashMap`. Results: `SkipList` (O(log N)) significantly slower for pure search due to scattered memory and poor cache locality. `Vec` excels with cache efficiency; `HashMap` offers fast O(1) search. Choose structure based on real workloads and memory/cache considerations.

Rust benchmark comparing `SkipList` vs `Vec` (binary search) vs `HashMap`. Results: `SkipList` (O(log N)) significantly slower for pure search due to scattered memory and poor cache locality. `Vec`...

GitHub