I didn’t mean to imply that it was; I was referring to countless developers I’ve worked with over the years who thought hash maps were the fastest
memory storage structure because they are generally O(1); they’ve mostly been ignorant of the fact that it’s only true for sufficiently small values of “1”.
This should be taught in computer classes, as an illustration that
O(1)does not necessarily mean “fastest”.It’s not O(1) though. There is still a normal sorting algorithm sorting this list, it’s just inside the OS scheduler.
I didn’t mean to imply that it was; I was referring to countless developers I’ve worked with over the years who thought hash maps were the fastest memory storage structure because they are generally
O(1); they’ve mostly been ignorant of the fact that it’s only true for sufficiently small values of “1”.