Previously in other posts (on data structures) we learned about Queues. Particularly speaking, we discussed what priority queues were. What we didn’t know is that the underlying foundation of priority queue is the heap data structure (which we will be learning about in this post). Remember that a priority queue is a data structure that allows you to access an item in a collection with the highest priority. Accessing such an item can be done in so many different ways such as using arrays or lists (binary trees being one of them). However the best way to implement priority queues is to use the heap. When accessing, inserting or deleting into  such data structures, the heap is the most performant (faster than arrays/lists/binary trees). What we really didn’t talk about in that post (on queues) was runtime complexity. We implemented methods such as enqueue, dequeue, etc. but we never considered how performant they were with basic operations such as adding and removing from the queue. Lets look at a diagram. Read More