swapandpop
Swap and pop is a technique for removing an element from a dynamic array or vector without preserving order. It achieves constant-time removal by placing the last element in the position of the element being removed and then reducing the container size by one. It is commonly used in performance-critical code such as game development, particle systems, and resource pools where frequent deletions occur and maintaining strict order is not required.
To remove the element at index i in an array A of length n: if i is
Time complexity is O(1) for removal by index, and O(n) to locate by value; space usage is
In practice, swap and pop works well in languages and environments where element movement is inexpensive and