Understanding Clojure's Persistent Vectors (2013)
hypirion.com
hypirion.com
Here is one library I've heard of https://immutable-js.com/ . I don't know of others.
Mori is the 'original' Clojure data-structures in Java Script.
https://github.com/mschaef/react-matchstick/commit/070802b69...
This was something of a worst case scenario (and it was five years ago, so presumably things have gotten better) but it still underscores the need to carefully consider these tools before adopting them. Do they really offer enough (to your application) to be worth the associated costs in readability, performance, etc.
If the goal is to prevent mutation, maybe there are better ways to do that. If the goal is to really accelerate, it's worth testing. (At the very least, Clojure's vectors seem unlikely to provide a benefit if you're working with vectors of len<32.)
I'm not surprised you saw huge speed up... I mean the original is looking up record fields by their name at runtime. That's bound to be extremely slow because it's basically impenetrable to the JIT optimizer.
In this case doing it the "immutable way" would be to create a data object, freeze it, instead only creating copies (themselves frozen) with individual fields changes as appropriate.
I do wonder how it would have performed if you'd removed the outer 'sx', 'sy', 'board' map layer and kept the 'board' as an ImmutableList (or whatever).
Having written persistent data structures in other lang's that are quite capable (170ns lookup 10,000,000 elements approx to give a rough guide) - yes it is an order slower than unordered hash mutable structures but often still faster than for example the mutable ordered ones I've tested with the advantage of still being immutable. This does benefit some scenarios where you want data sharing/cheap clones of data.
It was a bold decision with the potential to cause pain, but Clojure's vectors are great fun to work with. The "novel" basic data structures get out of the way and generally cause more joy than pain. It is part of a fundamental strategy enabling a strongly immutable style which really pays off when it works in concert with the rest of the language.
I did a quick survey of existing implementations in multiple languages and found all of them lacking. They are either overly complex, slow, or both. Even Clojure's vector, while being simple and very performant, is only usable as a stack, not as a queue, and therefore IMO inadequate as a "generic random-access array-like data structure" (akin to Python's list, i.e. "just use it don't worry about performance").
My version is about as fast as Clojure's vector, while implementing a "deque"-like interface. It's a bit more complex, but still significantly simpler than Scala's vectors (both Scala 2 and Scala 3). Cyclops (a Java-only persistent collection library) is so slow I didn't even bother finishing the benchmarks. I also compared my code to Rust's `im` (way more complex), C++'s `immer` (stack, not deque) and `immutable.js` (slower than ClojureScript).
I'll clean up the code and post it here.
Finger Trees as described in [1] are configurable to be several different kinds of data structures, but using them as a simple list gives you:
amortized O(1) insert, remove, update at head and tail
O(log n) insert, remove, update, worst case
O(log n) concatenation of two lists
I think it's a very nice data structure.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_tree
[1] https://www.staff.city.ac.uk/~ross/papers/FingerTree.pdf
Conclusion: unusuably slow (which kind-of makes sense, since it looks like the common implementation is a 2-3 fingertree - compared to a branching factor of 32 for Vector).
In my own, I use 2..5 branching because a sequence of appends on the front or back will tend to create a tree with 3 pointers per node (when you're about to hit 6, you split. If you get to 1, merge with a neighbor, etc...). Three is close to e, which is optimal in some sense for some operations.
I'm not a Java guy. For my use, having 32 way branching is pretty expensive because I use reference counting for each of the nodes. Since you have a true garbage collector, you don't have that cost, and it wouldn't be difficult to make a 2-32 way implementation.
Anyways, it sounds like you're not impressed and not interested. That's fine :-)