When elements are deleted the 'slots' assigned to them are marked as dead and returned to the pool of free slots, in a simple garbage-collection-like process. After much processing, this can lead to fragmentation and wasted empty space, so it would be useful to have mechanisms to explicitly and consistently compact things back down again, if desired.
When elements are deleted the 'slots' assigned to them are marked as dead and returned to the pool of free slots, in a simple garbage-collection-like process. After much processing, this can lead to fragmentation and wasted empty space, so it would be useful to have mechanisms to explicitly and consistently compact things back down again, if desired.