Circular buffer
lastmod 2018-08-17created 2016-12-302 edits
A circular buffer is a data structure that lets a fixed-size buffer be used as if its two ends were connected. With a circular buffer, a plain array can be used like a deque with almost no performance loss.
Implementation
A circular buffer usually consists of four elements:
- A fixed-size array
- The size of the array
- The position of the first data entered
- The position of the last data entered
Instead of the position of the last data entered, some implementations store the number of data items entered.