# From Theory to Practice: Plug and Play with Succinct Data Structures

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.1249 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.1249/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 5 Nov 2013.

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [RetroLLM: Empowering Large Language Models to Retrieve Fine-grained Evidence within Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11919/) (2024)
- [Koala: An Index for Quantifying Overlaps with Pre-training Corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14770/) (2023)
- [Infini-gram mini: Exact n-gram Search at the Internet Scale with FM-Index](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12229/) (2025)
- [GraphMineSuite: Enabling High-Performance and Programmable Graph Mining Algorithms with Set Algebra](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03653/) (2021)
- [Learned Compression of Nonlinear Time Series With Random Access](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16266/) (2024)
- [jXBW: A Compressed Index Enabling Structure-Aware JSONL Retrieval for Structured RAG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12536/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Engineering efficient implementations of compact and succinct structures is a time-consuming and challenging task, since there is no standard library of easy-to- use, highly optimized, and composable components. One consequence is that measuring the practical impact of new theoretical proposals is a difficult task, since older base- line implementations may not rely on the same basic components, and reimplementing from scratch can be very time-consuming. In this paper we present a framework for experimentation with succinct data structures, providing a large set of configurable components, together with tests, benchmarks, and tools to analyze resource requirements. We demonstrate the functionality of the framework by recomposing succinct solutions for document retrieval.