From birth I’ve always been taught to avoid nested arrays like the plague for performance and internal data structure reasons. So I’m trying to find a good solution for optimized multidimensional data structures in Ruby.
The typical solution would involve maybe using a 1D array and accessing each one by x*width + y.
Ruby has the ability to overload the [] operator, so perhaps a good solution would involve using multi_dimensional_array[2,4] or even use a splat to support arbitrary dimension amounts. (But really, I only need two dimensions)
Is there a library/gem already out there for this? If not, what would the best way to go about writing this be?
My nested-array-lookups are the bottleneck right now of my rather computationally-intensive script, so this is something that is important and not a case of premature optimization.
If it helps, my script uses mostly random lookups and less traversals.
narray