You would rarely use one in real life. I believe the purpose of the Fibonacci heap was to improve the asymptotic running time of Dijkstra’s algorithm. It might give you an improvement for very, very large inputs, but most of the time, a simple binary heap is all you need. From Wiki: Although the total … Read more
No, the standard Java collections API does not contain an implementation of a Fibonacci heap. I’m not sure why this is, but I believe it is because while Fibonacci heaps are asymptotically great in an amortized sense, they have huge constant factors in practice. The collections framework also doesn’t have a binomial heap, which would … Read more
This answer is going to be pretty long, but I hope it helps provide some insight as to where the Fibonacci heap comes from. I’m going to assume that you’re already familiar with binomial heaps and amortized analysis. Motivation: Why Fibonacci Heaps? Before jumping into Fibonacci heaps, it’s probably good to explore why we even … Read more
The Boost C++ libraries include an implementation of Fibonacci heaps in boost/pending/fibonacci_heap.hpp. This file has apparently been in pending/ for years and by my projections will never be accepted. Also, there have been bugs in that implementation, which were fixed by my acquaintance and all-around cool guy Aaron Windsor. Unfortunately, most of the versions of … Read more