Performance of nested yield in a tree

Question

I\'ve got a tree-like structure. Each element in this structure should be able to return a Enumerable of all elements it is root to. Let\'s call this method IEnumerabl

Answer 1

According to my prior experiences using yield is a lot more effective than creating a List. If you're using .NET 3.5, this implementation should be fine. But don't forget the

yield break;

At the end. :-)

Answer 2

No, that looks fine.

Have a look at my blog entry, it may be of some use :)

Answer 3

You can improve performance if you unroll recurse to stack, so you will have only one iterator:

public IEnumerable<Foo> GetAll()
{
    Stack<Foo> FooStack = new Stack<Foo>();
    FooStack.Push(this);

    while (FooStack.Count > 0)
    {
        Foo Result = FooStack.Pop();
        yield return Result;
        foreach (Foo NextFoo in Result.MyChildren)
            FooStack.Push(NextFoo);
    }
}

Answer 4

A better solution might be to create a visit method that recursively traverses the tree, and use that to collect items up.

Something like this (assuming a binary tree):

public class Node<T>
{
    public void Visit(Action<T> action)
    {
        action(this);
        left.Visit(action);
        right.Visit(action);
    }

    public IEnumerable<Foo> GetAll ()
    {
        var result = new List<T>();
        Visit( n => result.Add(n));
        return result;
    }
}

Taking this approach

• Avoids creating large numbers of nested iterators
• Avoids creating any more lists than necessary
• Is relatively efficient
• Falls down if you only need part of the list regularly

Answer 5

It's certainly not ideal in terms of performance - you end up creating a lot of iterators for large trees, instead of a single iterator which knows how to traverse efficiently.

Some blog entries concerning this:

• Wes Dyer: All about iterators
• Eric Lippert: Immutability in C#, part 6
• Eric again: Immutability in C#, part 7

It's worth noting that F# has the equivalent of the proposed "yield foreach" with "yield!"