Mastering Go - Second Edition

Using container/heap

In this subsection, you will see the functionality that the container/heap package offers. First of all, you should know that the container/heap package implements a heap, which is a tree where the value of each node of the tree is the smallest element in its subtree. Note that I am using the phrase smallest element instead of minimum value in order to make it clear that a heap does not only support numerical values.

However, as you can guess, in order to implement a heap tree in Go, you will have to develop a way to tell which of two elements is smaller than the other on your own. In such cases, Go uses interfaces because they allow you to define such a behavior.

This means that the container/heap package is more advanced ...