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CppCon 2017: Juan Pedro Bolivar Puente “Postmodern immutable data structures”

CppCon · talk · Watch on YouTube

C, C++, Rust, Go & systems languagesFunctional programmingAlgorithms & data structures

What it is

Juan Pedro Bolivar Puente explains immutable and persistent data structures in C++ and how they support value semantics. He presents the Immer library, rrb-trees, and a prototype text editor that opens a huge file instantly.

Why Hacker News recommends it

HN people point to it for rrb-trees, text editor data structures and bringing Clojure-style persistent structures to C++.

  • 5 people recommended it
  • 7 different months
  • 1 strong recommendations
  • first 2017, last 2025

What HN commenters said

  1. “Juan Pedro is a next level programmer who I think has pushed the craft forward”

    Better undo pattern than Command Pattern from Ableton developer

    nightowl_games, 2020-12 · Strong recommendation · in “Ask HN: What are the best advanced computer science courses online?”

  2. “talks about rrb-trees and how they're a great data structure for writing a text editor that can handle unlimited sized documents without locking up”

    Using rrb-trees for large-document text editing with undo

    proverbialbunny, 2019-08 · Recommendation · in “Build Your Own Text Editor”

  3. “Immer [0][1] seems like a really serious attempt at bringing high-quality persistent data structures to C++.”

    Introduces Immer persistent data structure library for C++

    bertmuthalaly, 2021-09 · Recommendation · in “Joker: A small interpreted dialect of Clojure written in Go”

  4. “See the author instantly opening a ~1GB text file with async loading”

    Prototype editor opening a 1GB file instantly using immutable vectors

    modernerd, 2023-06 · Recommendation · in “Text Editor Data Structures”

  5. “an impressive talk, in which someone shows their developed editor that can edit huge text files without lag”

    Editor handling huge files with functional data structures

    zelphirkalt, 2025-10 · Recommendation · in “Type Theory and Functional Programming (1999) [pdf]”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: immutable data, rrb-trees, c++, immer, text editors, functional programming

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