C# Binary Trees and Dictionaries

Question

I\'m struggling with the concept of when to use binary search trees and when to use dictionaries.

In my application I did a little experiment which used the C5 libra

Answer 1

You're not comparing "apples with apples", a BST will give you an ordered representation while a dictionary allows you to do a lookup on a key value pair (in your case ).

I wouldn't expect much size in the memory footprint between the 2 but the dictionary will give you a much faster lookup. To find an item in a BST you (potentially) need to traverse the entire tree. But to do a dictnary lookup you simply lookup based on the key.