If it matters, I found that storing this kind of data as a literal tree was less efficient than storing it as an already-sorted array and doing binary search on the array to splice/insert elements. JavaScript object creation is not free, apparently.
There's also the ol' encode-a-tree-in-an-array trick:
[5, 3, 7, 1, null, 6, 9, null, null, null, null, null, null]
is the same as
5
/ \
3 7
/ / \
1 6 9
i.e. children(N[i]) = N[2i+1], N[2i+2] . I don't know if that really gives you any win in JavaScript.
If you try out some alternatives to the binary tree, could you post your findings here? :)
