W/o benchmarks, but from theory - it's a rather different data structure.
1) for pure lookup-by-random-int-index, the standard array is much faster - in C you just calculate a memory location and there your data is; this structure requires, say, 4-6 such lookups depending on the array size, and is that many times slower.
2) On the other hand, iteration through large consecutive parts of the array is almost the same as pure arrays; there is some overhead but that's tiny.
3) Insertion is much faster than standard C/Java arrays - you can't really insert in the middle of an array w/o copying almost all of it, but you can do it here.
4) If you need "modification while keeping the old version as well" - then again, arrays need to make a full copy, but this beast can do it cheaply, faster than a raw C array.
As for any data structures, there are no "faster data structures" since preferences greatly depend on what you want to do with them, some data structures are faster for X and others are faster for Y. The efficiency of this structure greatly depends if your array/vector is mostly used as random-access-lookup or as a list where you need to process all/many sequential items.
Clojure's standard persistent vectors don't allow insertion in the middle without copying the entire vector, they only allow fast insertion at the end. There is an alternative implementation here [1] which does allow insertion (anywhere) without copying the entire vector.
1) for pure lookup-by-random-int-index, the standard array is much faster - in C you just calculate a memory location and there your data is; this structure requires, say, 4-6 such lookups depending on the array size, and is that many times slower.
2) On the other hand, iteration through large consecutive parts of the array is almost the same as pure arrays; there is some overhead but that's tiny.
3) Insertion is much faster than standard C/Java arrays - you can't really insert in the middle of an array w/o copying almost all of it, but you can do it here.
4) If you need "modification while keeping the old version as well" - then again, arrays need to make a full copy, but this beast can do it cheaply, faster than a raw C array.
As for any data structures, there are no "faster data structures" since preferences greatly depend on what you want to do with them, some data structures are faster for X and others are faster for Y. The efficiency of this structure greatly depends if your array/vector is mostly used as random-access-lookup or as a list where you need to process all/many sequential items.