We introduce the Random Access Zipper (RAZ), a simple, purely-functional data structure for editable sequences. A RAZ combines the structure of a zipper with that of a tree: like a zipper, edits at the cursor require constant time; by leveraging tree structure, relocating the edit cursor in the sequence requires logarithmic time. While existing data structures provide these time bounds, none do so with the same simplicity and brevity of code as the RAZ. The simplicity of the RAZ provides the opportunity for more programmers to extend the structure to their own needs, and we provide some suggestions for how to do so.
State-of-the-art immutable collections have wildly differing performance characteristics across their operations, often forcing programmers to choose different collection implementations for each task. Thus, changes to the program can invalidate the choice of collections, making code evolution costly. It would be desirable to have a collection that performs well for a broad range of operations. To this end, we present the RRB-Vector, an immutable sequence collection that offers good performance across a large number of sequential and parallel operations. The underlying innovations are: (1) the Relaxed-Radix-Balanced (RRB) tree structure, which allows efficient structural reorganization, and (2) an optimization that exploits spatio-temporal locality on the RRB data structure in order to offset the cost of traversing the tree. In our benchmarks, the RRB-Vector speedup for parallel operations is lower bounded by 7x when executing on 4 CPUs of 8 cores each. The performance for discrete operations, such as appending on either end, or updating and removing elements, is consistently good and compares favorably to the most important immutable sequence collections in the literature and in use today. The memory footprint of RRB-Vector is on par with arrays and an order of magnitude less than competing collections.