[Kerollmops]

> Interesting. Could you elaborate on the benefit of this?

I don't know on what I can elaborate.

Storing integers that are near each other is much more optimal in a RoaringBitmap than in a flat array. The reason is that it will only store the integers by storing the high part once and the low part in an array or bitmap efficiently.

Also we already use RoaringBitmaps on the other end of Meilisearch and converting that to another data structure could take a lot of times.

[marginalia_nu]

It's clearly a more succinct representation, but based on my prior experience with these structures it seems like it would come at a not insignificant fee in access costs, and while sometimes they're better, there appear to be many cases where they are not.

Don't take this as me questioning your design process or choices, I'm sure they are well motivated, I just think it's a good practice to be curious as to how when someone reaches a different conclusion than yourself :-)

[Kerollmops]

Indeed, there could probably be cases where you see higher deserialization cost than raw lists of integers. But when it comes to high number of integers I can confirm that it is much more efficient.

[marginalia_nu]

Hmm, I should do some benchmarks I guess... Thanks for the datapoints :)