[question - documentation] How good/relevant `pathfinding` compared to `petgraph`?
robinmoussu opened this issue · comments
Hello,
I was searching a crate to manipulate a graph, and use some algorithms on it, especially Dijkstra. I read on many places that petgraph is the goto solution in Rust to do such things. But when I searched "Dijkstra" on lib.rs, you crate was higher ranked. Given how petgraph seems recommended in the Rust community, I was really surprised that there is no mention of it in the readme. Can this crate interact with petgraph, is it better (faster, more memory efficient, …). Why should I choose to use one over the other, especially since it appears that lib.rs considers that this crate has better quality?
Sincerely and thanks for the hard work.
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I just have no idea. I started writing this crate while learning Rust and doing the Advent of Code 2016 because I could not find what I needed. Then I needed an implementation in O(n³) of the Hungarian algorithm for a problem at work (assigning ~200 students to projects while respecting their preferences, the Python implementation was slow as hell). In the meantime I added some more algorithms as I needed them in my projects or in subsequent years of Advent of Code.
I have never benchmarked the library against petgraph, nor used it with petgraph data structures, but I would welcome benchmarks.
Arf! I don't think I will have time to compare them 😞 You can close this issue, unless you think that someone else may have a better answer.
One difference between these libraries is that petgraph requires you to create the entire graph ahead of time, while with pathfinding (at least for dijkstra and A*) you specify a successors function, allowing you to pathfind over infinite procedural graphs, which is handy for some Advent of Code challenges.
One difference between these libraries is that petgraph requires you to create the entire graph ahead of time, while with pathfinding (at least for dijkstra and A*) you specify a successors function, allowing you to pathfind over infinite procedural graphs, which is handy for some Advent of Code challenges.
This is not entirely true, as algorithms like A* need the graph only to implement 2 traits that you can implement yourself and have a graph that grows over time.
Doing this should not be too complicated, but the default Graph Structures from petgraph do not have this ability afaik, that is true.