Performance Analysis of Zippers

Abstract

A zipper is a powerful technique of representing a purely functional data structure in a way that allows fast access to a specific element. It is often used in cases where the imperative data structures would use a mutable pointer. However, the efficiency of zippers as a replacement for mutable pointers is not sufficiently explored. We attempt to address this issue by comparing the performance of zippers and mutable pointers in two common scenarios and three different languages: C++, C#, and Haskell.