Binary heap (priority queue) and heap sort in the library

[dr-m]

I believe that many applications would benefit from having something that would find the N best elements of a larger collection, as well as something that would sort a list according to a comparison predicate, like this,

[4,5,1].sort(/ a b -> a < b)

As part of arendst/Tasmota#22529 I implemented a module binary_heap.be that defines make_heap, remove_heap, and sort. I checked the internals of Berry a little, and I understood that most if not all of the built-in modules are implemented in native code. I see that the implementation of the list data structure resembles a C++ std::vector<object*>. This is great, because it facilitates a straightforward array representation of a binary heap, like the one implemented in the Berry module. It would seem to be technically feasible to implement this natively by defining a few more functions in the built-in list module. I’d be interested in such an exercise, but I would like to know how likely it would be for it to be included in Berry as well as Tasmota. I see that @s-hadinger is active in both projects.

If this idea is considered feasible, I’d welcome some suggestions regarding naming. list.sort(cmp) or list.heap_sort(cmp) would be intuitive, but list.make_heap(cmp) and list.remove_heap(cmp) could feel somewhat awkward.

[s-hadinger]

I'm a bit skeptical in the fact of embedding such libraries. Either they are simple and often too simplistic, or they try to generalize (like providing a closure for comparison) and quickly become cumbersome and much slower. In my Tasmota experience, it's better to have your own super-compact implementation that fits your need. I did this for 2 or 3 different variants of insertion sort.