Persistent data structure

A persistent data structure always preserves its previous version when it is modified. Such data structures are effectively immutable, as their operations do not (visibly) update the structure in-place, but instead always yield a new updated structure.

A data structure is partially persistent if all versions can be accessed but only the newest version can be modified. The data structure is fully persistent if every version can be both accessed and modified. If there is also a meld or merge operation that can create a new version from two previous versions, the data structure is called confluently persistent. Structures that are not persistent are called ephemeral.

These types of data structures are particularly common in logical and functional programming, and in a purely functional program all data is immutable, so all data structures are automatically fully persistent. Persistent data structures can also be created using in-place updating of data and these may, in general, use less time or storage space than their purely functional counterparts.

While persistence can be achieved by simple copying, this is inefficient in CPU and RAM usage, because most operations make only small changes to a data structure. A better method is to exploit the similarity between the new and old versions to share structure between them, such as using the same subtree in a number of tree structures. However, because it rapidly becomes infeasible to determine how many previous versions share which parts of the structure, and because it is often desirable to discard old versions, this necessitates an environment with garbage collection.