On modern hardware the min-max heap beats a binary heap
Like folks mentioned there, I wonder if a higher-fanout heap (people asked about 4-ary) might also do well in practice. Looking at Wikipedia (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-ary_heap" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-ary_heap</a>), it looks like maybe so -- the growth in number of comparisons isn't that bad, and it mentions 4-ary heaps working well specifically.<p>(Like how linear search wins for small N, or insertion sort helps with small subarrays in introsort: more steps, but each step is also a lot cheaper on modern hardware due to fewer branch mispredictions, better cache locality, or something else that better fits the hardware's strengths.)