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islands

An implementation of the Islands problem as presented by Jim Bennett & Ryan Levick on YouTube.

The premise:

Given a grid of locations which can either be land or water, determine how many islands are on the grid.

I wanted to write it as an industrial-strength solution to aid in conversations and mentoring work that I do with other Rustaceans.

It is designed to be/have:

  • Panic-free: Out-of-memory conditions can still fail the algorithm (it inserts into a HashSet). This situation will persist until Rust stabilizes fallible collections.

    NOTE: This implementation is recursive to better relate to the YouTube stream, and so will run out of (configurable) stack space if the World map is large enough (~1300 elements in either dimension with the default stack). It is possible to translate this implementation to a loop to eliminate this concern.

  • Declarative/functional: By focusing on shaping the data, instead of "micromanaging CPU state", the program is subject to far fewer bugs, is more expressive and tends to compile to tighter code in release mode. Chief drawbacks to this include i) lower familiarity in the general engineering populace/deeper software engineering experience required to read and write this way and ii) debug tools remain optimized for imperative-style code, which can make intermediate fluent values hard to access.

  • Strong type-safety: By encoding invariants (things that need to be true in order for the program to work correctly) into data types using the type system, users of these types will receive more compile-time errors, which prevents bugs. It also lowers the burden of development, since empty lists, rectangular lists, dimension overflow and other issues are all handled at World's construction time. If it exists, it is valid. This frees developers of all other code using World, (in this small example) from the burden of having to remember when to check all of the various invariants, each time the code is touched, forever.

  • Efficient: Representing the world internally as a 1D contiguous Boxed slice of values gives good default CPU cache-efficiency. Compare this with a Vec<Vec<T>>, where each inner Vec<T> is a distinct heap allocation with no promise of locality. A [[T; COLS]; ROWS] is contiguous and efficient, but requires const (compile-time) dimensions, which may be limiting for some use cases.

  • Ergonomic: Users of the count_islands() function simply pass in a map. Internal tracking of visited locations is handled... internally. The World type, although internally implemented as a 1D array, presents a 2D interface in the is_land() method, making it "pit-of-success" convenient to use without leaking the 1D slice abstraction.

    This implementation does not attempt to provide World converting constructors from "convenient-but-performance-eating-antipattern" types like Vec<Vec<T>>. This is a form of opinionated API which is a weak pit-of-success forcing function.

  • Compiler warnings turned up to 11: Putting the compiler in strict mode surfaces more warnings. If one accepts that "warnings are just errors that haven't happened yet", dealing with them from the beginning yields more resilient code and in my experience, the additional constraints can drive the discovery of more expressive designs.

License

Licensed under either:

  • MIT license (see LICENSE-MIT file)
  • Apache License, Version 2.0 (see LICENSE-APACHE file) at your option.

Contributions

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.