Removing a collection element invalidated the parent's whole flattened
index set, so the next sibling navigation rebuilt it in O(children) -- and
that renumber, not the array shift, was the dominant cost: a reverse
(tail-first) removal, which shifts nothing, was still quadratic, isolating
EnsureChildIndices as the culprit.
When a node's only collection is also its last slot it owns the contiguous
range [base, base + Count) with nothing after it, so an element's flattened
index is just base + its local position (base is the slot's declaration
position, since the preceding slots are all single children). On that
fast-path -- which the generator now flags, passing the base index -- Add
indexes only the appended element, Insert/Remove renumber only the shifted
suffix, and IndexOf is base-relative O(1); none of them invalidate. Other
shapes (several collections, or a slot after the collection) keep the
invalidate-and-rebuild fallback. Tail and scattered removal, and removal
during traversal, no longer pay the per-operation renumber.
Microbenchmark, removing every element of an N-element block: tail-first at
N=32000 went 1493 ms -> 0.5 ms (now O(N)); front-first is ~1.6x faster and
no longer renumbers (its residual cost is the inherent array shift). Output
is byte-identical and the Pretty suite stays green with CheckInvariant
validating the maintained indices after every transform.
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-4-8:Claude Code
Siegfried Pammer
a04be1dd53