From Scratch: Building and Benchmarking a Binary Search Tree in Go
In this post, I document my journey of building a Binary Search Tree (BST) from the ground up in Go. We start with raw memory pointers and end with a high-performance search engine that beats linear scanning by 6x. 1. The Physical Foundation: The Node A tree is just a collection of “buckets” in memory. In Go, we define this using a struct with pointers to other nodes. 1 2 3 4 5 type Node struct { value int8 left *Node right *Node } 2. The Logic: Smart Insertion To make this a Search tree, we need a rule: Small values go left, large values go right. We use recursion to let the tree “find” the correct empty slot. ...