Data Structures and Algorithms in C

⚠️ This project is under development!

This project provides code examples for various data structures and algorithms in C90 (ANSI C) with a focus on correctness, safety, and simplicity.

🧪 List

🧩 Data Structures

File	Data Structure	Description
simple_bst.c	Binary Searcy Tree (BST)	Basic, unbalanced tree
avl_tree.c	AVL Tree	Search and Delete operations are unimplemented

🥜 Sorting Algorithms

File	Algorithm	Description	Recursive	Buffer-based
merge_sort.c	Merge Sort	Top-down	Yes	Yes (buffer-based merging)
tree_sort.c	Tree Sort	Simple BST	Yes	Yes (BST)
tree_sort_no_recursion.c	Tree Sort	Simple BST	No	Yes (BST and stacks)

📑 Usage

Just copy the code into existing code bases and refactor it a bit to fit your preferences. The code is short and doing that should be easy for any programmers.

The sorted element type is int in the examples, but those can easily be used for any comparable types.

👟 Build Guide

🪟 Windows

In case you need something to run out-of-the-box, you can follow the instruction in this section.

⚠️ This project’s Makefile uses Windows shell commands. It will not work on Unix/Linux/macOS without modification. Efforts for cross-platform compatibility is in progress.

📦 Installation (on Windows)

1. Install Scoop if you haven't already.
2. Install make and gcc:

scoop install make gcc

3. Clone this repository and cd into it.
4. Use make (see below) to build and run.

🛠️ Building

To build all sorting executables:

make

Each .c file in the project will produce a corresponding binary in build/bin/.

▶️ Running

You can run a sorting program like this:

make run NAME=merge_sort ARGS="5 1212 33 3 -1 0"

This runs the compiled binary build/bin/merge_sort with the following input:

• First argument: number of elements (5)
• Next arguments: array elements (1212 33 3 -1 0)

Output:

-1 0 3 33 1212

🧹 Cleaning

To clean all build artifacts:

make clean

This will remove the entire build/ directory, including binaries and object files.

🚀 Planned Features

• Ensure portability for Makefile (not just working on Windows)
• Merge Sort
• Tree Sort
  • Using simple BST
  • Using red-black tree
• Quicksort
• Heap Sort
• Insertion Sort
• Bubble Sort
• Shell Sort
• Unit tests for correctness
• Benchmarking mode

📋 License

This project is provided under the Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal, i.e. this work is under world-wide public domain.