String Interner

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A string interning data structure that was designed for minimal memory overhead, fast access to the underlying interned strings and cache-efficient iteration through its contents.

This implementation uses a similar API as the string interner of the Rust compiler.

What is a string interner?

String internment is an efficient bi-directional mapping between strings and very cheap identifiers (symbols) that are used as representant for a certain string instead of the string itself.

Internals

Internally a hashmap and a vector is used. The vector stored the true contents of interned strings while the hashmap has internal references into the internal vector to avoid duplicates.

Planned Features

• Safe abstraction wrapper that protects the user from the following misusage

  • Using symbols of a different string interner instance to resolve string in another
  • Using symbols that are already no longer valid (i.e. the associated string interner is no longer available)

• Even more flexibility for input into the string interner

Changelog

• 0.6.3

  • fixed a bug that StringInterner's Send impl didn't respect its generic HashBuilder parameter. Fixes GitHub issue #4.

• 0.6.2

  • added shrink_to_fit public method to StringInterner - (by artemshein)

• 0.6.1

  • fixed a bug that inserting non-owning string types (e.g. str) was broken due to dangling pointers (Thanks to artemshein for fixing it!)

• 0.6.0

  • added optional serde serialization and deserialization support
  • more efficient and generic PartialEq implementation for StringInterner
  • made StringInterner generic over BuildHasher to allow for custom hashers

• 0.5.0

  • added IntoIterator trait implementation for StringInterner
  • greatly simplified iterator code

• 0.4.0

  • removed restrictive constraint for Unsigned for Symbol

• 0.3.3

  • added Send and Sync to InternalStrRef to make StringInterner itself Send and Sync