Skiplists are probabilistic data structures that can replace balanced trees, offering fast insertion, deletion, and search operations. LevelDB's skip list implementation is concise, stable in performance, and suitable for storing data in memory MemTables.

This article starts by discussing the drawbacks of current binary search trees and balanced trees, introducing skip lists as a data structure. Then, based on the original paper, it explains the implementation principles of skip lists, followed by a detailed analysis of LevelDB's implementation code, including iterator implementation and extreme performance optimization for concurrent reading.

Finally, it provides a visualization page that intuitively shows the skip list construction process.