BigArray

The Array type in Crystal can only contain Int32::MAX (2 ** 32 - 1) elements because it uses 32-bit integers for indexing. This is useful for everyday operations, but sometimes you need to account for larger collections.

Installation

1. Add the dependency to your shard.yml:

   dependencies:
     big_array:
       github: jgaskins/big_array
   

2. Run shards install

Usage

require "big_array"

Many common operations on Array are supported, such as Enumerable and indexing with [] and related methods, but not all operations are supported yet and some methods will return an Array rather than a BigArray. PRs are welcome.

array = BigArray{1, 2, 3}
array.each do |i|
  puts i
end

You probably don't want to use this in place of an Array all the time, and probably only for larger amounts of data. Some operations that are handy for small arrays, mostly quality-of-life methods like to_s and inspect to show the contents of the array, are not and will not be implemented on BigArray because you almost certainly don't want to accidentally output billions of objects to your terminal. If you need those methods, you probably don't also need to hold billions of values in the same data structure.

Development

TODO: Write development instructions here

Contributing

1. Fork it (https://github.com/jgaskins/big_array/fork)
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request

Contributors

• Jamie Gaskins - creator and maintainer