Flat Trees are the core data structure that power Hypercore feeds. They allow us to deterministically represent a tree structure as a vector. This is particularly useful because vectors map elegantly to disk and memory. Because Flat Trees are deterministic and pre-computed, there is no overhead to using them. In effect this means that Flat Trees are a specific way of indexing into a vector more than they are their own data structure. This makes them uniquely efficient and convenient to implement in a wide range of languages.
$ pip install flat-tree
from flat_tree import FlatTreeIterator
tree_iter = FlatTreeIterator()
print("tree index: ", tree_iter.index)
print("tree first parent: ", tree_iter.parent())
print("tree next parent", tree_iter.parent())
Output:
tree index: 0
tree first parent: 1
tree next parent 3