Heap Data Structure

Introduction This post covers binary heaps as a complete binary tree stored in an array, where each parent follows a priority rule (min-heap or max-heap). It explains the core operations push (heapifyUp) and pop (heapifyDown), the heap property, and provides an implementation. It also covers trade-offs of using heaps as priority queues, real use in greedy algorithms like Dijkstra’s algorithm and Huffman coding, O(n) in-place heap construction, plus heapsort, and a discussion about introsort. Bin