Priority queue in .Net [closed]

Question

I am looking for a .NET implementation of a priority queue or heap data structure

Priority queues are data structures that provide more flexibility than simple sorting, because they allow new elements to enter a system at arbitrary intervals. It is much more cost-effective to insert a new job into a priority queue than to re-sort everything on each such arrival.

The basic priority queue supports three primary operations:

• Insert(Q,x). Given an item x with key k, insert it into the priority queue Q.
• Find-Minimum(Q). Return a pointer to the item whose key value is smaller than any other key in the priority queue Q.
• Delete-Minimum(Q). Remove the item from the priority queue Q whose key is minimum

Unless I am looking in the wrong place, there isn't one in the framework. Is anyone aware of a good one, or should I roll my own?

Answer 1

AlgoKit

I wrote an open source library called AlgoKit, available via NuGet. It contains:

• Implicit d-ary heaps (ArrayHeap),
• Binomial heaps,
• Pairing heaps.

The code has been extensively tested. I definitely recommend you to give it a try.

Example

var comparer = Comparer<int>.Default;
var heap = new PairingHeap<int, string>(comparer);

heap.Add(3, "your");
heap.Add(5, "of");
heap.Add(7, "disturbing.");
heap.Add(2, "find");
heap.Add(1, "I");
heap.Add(6, "faith");
heap.Add(4, "lack");

while (!heap.IsEmpty)
    Console.WriteLine(heap.Pop().Value);

Why those three heaps?

The optimal choice of implementation is strongly input-dependent — as Larkin, Sen, and Tarjan show in A back-to-basics empirical study of priority queues, arXiv:1403.0252v1 [cs.DS]. They tested implicit d-ary heaps, pairing heaps, Fibonacci heaps, binomial heaps, explicit d-ary heaps, rank-pairing heaps, quake heaps, violation heaps, rank-relaxed weak heaps, and strict Fibonacci heaps.

AlgoKit features three types of heaps that appeared to be most efficient among those tested.

Hint on choice

For a relatively small number of elements, you would likely be interested in using implicit heaps, especially quaternary heaps (implicit 4-ary). In case of operating on larger heap sizes, amortized structures like binomial heaps and pairing heaps should perform better.

Answer 2

I found one by Julian Bucknall on his blog here - http://www.boyet.com/Articles/PriorityQueueCSharp3.html

We modified it slightly so that low-priority items on the queue would eventually 'bubble-up' to the top over time, so they wouldn't suffer starvation.