insaneinside / symtern Goto Github PK

I've been playing around with it because it seems like it does exactly what I need, but I'm cautious about doing that when it also seems like it's gone inactive, with a couple of caveats still scattered around the documentation and bug tracker.

The symbol pool implemented in basic.rs uses a value's hash as the key to pool's HashMap instance, which effectively bypasses any collision handling that would normally be provided by the map. This design was meant to avoid the overhead and additional complexity of using something like Rc where shared ownership isn't actually required — but clearly needs some rethinking.

Travis builds are failing because travis-cargo no longer works.
It's time to take the time to gain a more thorough understanding of how Travis works, and then update .travis.yml.

The generalized structure of Pool uses the ToOwned trait to store it's T's internally.
For str this leads to the usage of String as internal data type for the underlying Vec<_>.
This is inferior to Box<str> which requires less memory than String since it is missing the capacity field which makes it approximately 33% smaller than String.
So in theory using Box<str> instead of String should result in faster access times due to less cache-trashing.

This can be addressed by specializing Pool for str to store Box<str> instead of String.
The drawbacks are that specialization is currently a nightly feature, however it should be possible to implement this specialization as op-in for depencendies that are okay with nightly versions of the compiler.

Also there should be trait impls for the different kinds of String types within rust.
So interning a &str should copy the contents while String or Box<str> should move them.