Performance Analysis of Zippers

TL;DR

This paper compares the performance of zippers and mutable pointers across different programming languages and scenarios to evaluate their efficiency as data structure representations.

Contribution

It provides an empirical analysis of zipper performance versus mutable pointers in C++, C#, and Haskell, filling a gap in understanding their practical efficiency.

Findings

Zippers can offer comparable access times to mutable pointers in certain scenarios.

Performance varies significantly across languages and use cases.

The study highlights the conditions under which zippers are a viable alternative to mutable pointers.

Abstract

A zipper is a powerful technique of representing a purely functional data structure in a way that allows fast access to a specific element. It is often used in cases where the imperative data structures would use a mutable pointer. However, the efficiency of zippers as a replacement for mutable pointers is not sufficiently explored. We attempt to address this issue by comparing the performance of zippers and mutable pointers in two common scenarios and three different languages: C++, C#, and Haskell.