PowerCollections: Introduction

If you're still not aware of the Wintellect PowerCollections, now is the time. This library was designed to extend the standard class library with new containers and pre-written algorithms. A list of the containers with short descriptions follows:

• Bag<T> - is a collection that contains items of type T. It's like a set, but allows duplicate values.
  
• BigList<T> - provides a list of indexed items, like the standard List class. However, BigList is optimized for efficient operations on large lists, especially for insertions, deletions, copies, and concatenations.
  
• Deque<T> - is an implementation of so-called Double Ended Queue. That means, in a Deque, items can be added to the beginning or end equally efficiently, regardless of the number of items in the Deque. However, a Deque is a little bit slower than a List when being indexed to read elements.
  
• MultiDictionary<TKey, TValue> - is a class that associates values with a key. Unlike a standard Dictionary, a key can have multiple values (Enumeration) associated with it.
  
• OrderedBag<T> - is a collection that contains items of type T in a sort order, and allows duplicate values in it.
  
• OrderedDictionary<TKey, TValue> - is a collection that maps items of type TKey to items of type TValue. Only one value (which can be null) per key is allowed. The inner structure is a balanced binary (sorted) tree. Unlike Dictionary, keys of this collection are compared through the compare function, not by hash.
  
• OrderedMultiDictionary<TKey, TValue> - is a collection like OrderedDictionary, but allows more than one value per a key. All these values are stored in sorted order as well as keys.
  
• OrderedSet<T> - a collection that stores items of type T in sorted order, and doesn't allow duplicates.
  
• Set<T> - is a collection that just stores unique items of type T. Items are compared through the Comparable interface or the Equal method.

Here is at least one container that was implemented not merely to benefit in its unique functions or conceptual features, but because of performance. I'm talking about the BigList vs List competition. I'm gonna test their performance in the coming article.