The Hunt for the Missing Data Type
https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/graph-types/
There is almost no graph support in any mainstream language. None have it as a built-in type, very few have them in the standard library, and many don’t have a robust third-party library in the ecosystem. Most of the time, I have to roll graphs from scratch. There’s a gap between how often software engineers could use graphs and how little our programming ecosystems support them. Where are all the graph types?
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Many, many graph algorithms are NP-complete or harder. While NP-complete is often tractable for large problems, graphs can be enormous problems. The choice of representation plays a big role in how fast you can complete it, as do the specifics of your algorithm implementation...
All of this means that if you have graph problems you want to solve, you need a lot of control over the specifics of your data representation and algorithm. You simply cannot afford to leave performance on the table.
So, the reasons we don’t have widespread graph support:
- There are many different kinds of graphs
- There are many different representations of each kind of graph
- There are many different graph algorithms
- Graph algorithm performance is very sensitive to graph representation and implementation details
- People run very expensive algorithms on very big graphs.
via news.yc