although he doesn't really explain why HAMTs specifically are slow
Hello, author here :)
HAMTs are certainly slower, for "churning" operations, i.e., lots of updates, which is where Clojure exposes the transient API, which gives you limited localized mutability (some terms and conditions may apply)
Where iteration is concerned, they standard library implementation is pretty good. It relies on chunks of 64 element arrays which store the keys and values contiguously. Thus, APIs which expose direct iteration, Iterator and IReduce(Init) operate on these chunks one at a time. It isn't as fast as primitive arrays, but it's pretty fast.
Comments
Hello, author here :)
HAMTs are certainly slower, for "churning" operations, i.e., lots of updates, which is where Clojure exposes the transient API, which gives you limited localized mutability (some terms and conditions may apply)
Where iteration is concerned, they standard library implementation is pretty good. It relies on chunks of 64 element arrays which store the keys and values contiguously. Thus, APIs which expose direct iteration, Iterator and IReduce(Init) operate on these chunks one at a time. It isn't as fast as primitive arrays, but it's pretty fast.