Min/Max Heap or Priority Queue data structure in Objective-C

Question

Is there Min/Max Heap or Priority Queue like data structure provided by the system framework in Objective-C?

I can implement it myself or use a third party library, but I'm just curious if the system has already provide it like Java does.

Answer 1

For priority queues: No. There is no generic standard in Cocoa, even classes as NSOperationQueue uses priority queues.

For min-max heaps: No. And you will never find. A min-max heap is a structure to implement a priority queue. Cocoa's APIs are never built on top of an implementation, but from the final collection. I. e. you have NSArray for ordered collections. There are several structures used for implementing that array. But you always get the final product NSArray independent of the structure used internally.

This is a design principle of Cocoa.

So, if someone (Apple, someone else, you) implements a priority queue, he likely uses min-max heaps. But you will never know, if it is implemented according to the concepts of Cocoa.