new_blog/projects/cpp-std-map.md

C++ std::map partial implementation

The what

C++ has something called std::map as a part of the standard library. I implemented a subset of the functionality present in std::map for a class I took in college.

This was done via a red-black tree which was a pain in the ass to deal with due to me not knowing how red black trees worked at the start and making the mistake of having the root node be a special case.

What was learned

Doing anything with graphs in languages which aren't trace garbage collected is painful and making the root node std::optional<Node> while all chidren are std::unique_ptr<Node> is a bad idea due to it basically mandating code duplication.