[DEV] Programming advice and tips & tricks

This page is a collection of FYI- and TIL-items that spotlights particular useful utilities or programming patterns that aren't obvious or little known. Take them as an offering and not as some must-do.

Disposable utils

TODO@Matt

Data structures

• native Map and Set are sorted by insertion order 💡 this is a little-know but can come handy
• ResourceMap and ResourceSet which are normal maps/sets but keyed by URI (src/vs/base/common/map.ts)
• LRUCache is a map with recency and trimming abilities (src/vs/base/common/map.ts)
• [TernarySearchTree](https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/8c946e23f45f39fdd982cff1e1fce02a8e3dc719/src/vs/base/common/map.ts#L333) is map-like with the ability to lookup sub and super-strings (useful for path containment) (src/vs/base/common/map.ts`)
• SkipList is a map which is sorted based on a custom comparator function (src/vs/base/common/skipList.ts)
• LinkedList like arrays but with faster removal/insertion (src/vs/base/common/linkedList.ts)

String/array utils

The modules src/vs/base/common/arrays.ts and src/vs/base/common/strings.ts have many very useful utilities when dealing with arrays or strings.

Iterables

The src/vs/base/common/iterator.ts modules contains utilities for working with iterables. Iterables can be a better alternative than arrays because they enforce readonly-ness by design and hence saving Array.slice-calls