This used to be a linear search O(n), but is now done
as a red-black tree O(log n) instead.
These operations can be further opimized with a hash-table
which would acheive near constant time lookups.
for certain lookups.
The rb_tree will act as a general purpose key/value storage, and
also give a performance boost in the cases where the other
simple alternative would be to use a linked_list.
On average this should give on average O(log n) lookups, while the linked_list
would be O(n) at worst.
Boris Pek
Jan Vidar Krey