“If you’re skeptical, I really do encourage you to watch, he’s not sloppy.”
How sentinels speed up textbook algorithms and how to apply them sensibly
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See Alexandrescu’s Fastware talk on how amazingly sentinels can improve even textbook algorithms, and how to apply the approach intelligently. E.g., for a linear search, overwrite the last element with the sought after value, and do a tiny bit of work to make that safe and to undo it before return. If you’re skeptical, I really do encourage you to watch, he’s not sloppy. this video