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Omar Ahmed Abdel Hameed
Omar Ahmed Abdel Hameed

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Why Scapegoat Trees Are Underrated (and My C++ Implementation)

Ever felt like AVL trees are too strict and Red-Black trees are way too picky? Enter the Scapegoat Tree—a balanced binary search tree that punishes misbehaving nodes only when necessary.

I decided to implement one in C++26, complete with Python bindings, because sometimes the best learning comes from building things yourself—and because, honestly, they’re underrated and cool.


🚀 Features

  • Automatic α-Weight balancing
  • Insert, delete, search—all optimized
  • Compute sum in range, retrieve values in range, find k-th smallest element
  • Forward iterator support (yes, for(auto x : tree) works!)
  • Undo/Redo system
  • Tree merging with duplicate handling
  • Custom data structures: Vector, Queue, Stack
  • Terminal UI for interactive exploration

Basically, it’s the Swiss Army knife of BSTs.


💻 How to Use

git clone https://github.com/OmarAhmedTHE25th/ScapeGoatTree
cd ScapeGoatTree/CPP
# Build and run your examples
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Python bindings are available for quick prototyping or testing.


🛠 Why It’s Cool

  • Minimal STL usage—everything is built from scratch
  • Clean API and operator overloading for intuitive syntax
  • Extensive testing and interactive documentation available

Check out the full API docs (https://omarahmedthe25th.github.io).


🔗 Get Involved

Open an issue, submit a PR, or just try it out! I’d love to see how others use the Scapegoat Tree in real projects.
https://github.com/OmarAhmedTHE25th/ScapeGoatTree


Tags: C++, data-structures, algorithms, trees, open-source, Python

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