functional programming: immutable data structure efficiency

Question

I don't understand, how FP compilers make the code dealing with immutable data structures fast, not blow up stack, etc.

For example, insert operation in tree, it has to copy the whole tree before adding the new node and return the copied tree, versus the imperative couterpart that only needs to add a pointer to the new node. If the insert operation is run millions times, it would take a load of memory, and copying will be slower and slower when the tree is bigger. How do FP compilers actually optimize this ?

Answer 1

You don't have to copy the whole tree to make a change; you can share most of the structure. See e.g. the diagrams in this blog, or this talk by Rich Hickey on Clojure (see discussion of hash tries about halfway through).