Understanding Clojure's Persistent Vectors, Part 1

Does anyone have benchmarks comparing the performance of Clojure's PersistentVectors to standard arrays in Java and/or C? O(1) is pretty useless if the constant factor is huge. Anecdotally, I've heard that they are "fast" but it would be interesting to know what that really means.

&gt; They are a data structure invented by Rich Hickey for Clojure<p>It is an implementation of a data structure invented by Phil Bagwell: <a href="http://lampwww.epfl.ch/papers/idealhashtrees.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lampwww.epfl.ch&#x2F;papers&#x2F;idealhashtrees.pdf</a>

&quot;practically O(1)&quot; is an interesting statement

Awesome post! The diagrams are really great additions. I look forward to the rest of the series. :)

Branching factor 32 is great for lookups, but isn&#x27;t it slower for modification? At least, one has to create more array cells in total (31 copies in each node), no?