Expand description
§Indexical: Human-Friendly Indexed Collections
Indexical is a library for conveniently and efficiently working with indexed collections of objects. “Indexed” means that the domain of objects is finite, and you can assign a numeric index to each object. This enables the use of efficient data structures like bit-sets.
Indexical is a layer on top of existing bit-set libraries like bitvec
and rustc_index::bit_set.
Those data structures only “understand” raw indexes, not the objects represented by the index.
Indexical provides utilities for converting between the object domain and the index domain.
§Example
use indexical::{IndexedDomain, IndexedValue, bitset::bitvec::IndexSet};
use std::rc::Rc;
// 1. Define a custom type.
#[derive(PartialEq, Eq, Clone, Hash)]
pub struct MyString(String);
// 2. Define a new index for your custom type.
indexical::define_index_type! {
    pub struct StringIndex for MyString = u32;
}
// 3. Create an immutable indexed domain from a collection of objects.
// By default this is Rc-wrapped, but you can also use Arc or &-refs.
let domain = Rc::new(IndexedDomain::from_iter([
    MyString(String::from("Hello")), MyString(String::from("world"))
]));
// 4. Now you can make a set! Notice how you can pass either a `MyString`
// or a `StringIndex` to `set.insert(..)` and `set.contains(..)`.
let mut set = IndexSet::new(&domain);
set.insert(MyString(String::from("Hello")));
set.insert(StringIndex::from_usize(1));
assert!(set.contains(&MyString(String::from("world"))));§Design
The key idea is that the IndexedDomain is shared pervasively
across all Indexical types. All types can then use the IndexedDomain to convert between indexes and objects, usually via the ToIndex trait.
IndexSet and IndexMatrix are generic with respect to two things:
- The choice of bit-set implementation. By default, Indexical includes the 
bitveccrate and provides thebitset::bitvec::IndexSettype. You can provide your own bit-set implementation via thebitset::BitSettrait. - The choice of domain pointer. By default, Indexical uses the 
Rcpointer via theRcFamilytype. You can choose to use theArcFamilyif you need concurrency, or theRefFamilyif you want to avoid reference-counting. 
Modules§
- Abstraction over bit-set implementations.
 - Map-like collections for indexed keys.
 - Abstraction over smart pointers.
 
Macros§
- Creates a new index type and associates it with an object type.
 
Structs§
- An unordered collections of pairs
(R, C), implemented with a sparse bit-matrix. - An unordered collections of
Ts, implemented with a bit-set. - An indexed collection of objects.
 - Coherence hack for the
ToIndextrait. - Coherence hack for the
ToIndextrait. - Coherence hack for the
ToIndextrait. 
Traits§
- Workaround for GAT lifetime issue.
 - Generic interface for converting iterators into indexical collections.
 - Links a type to its index.
 - Extension trait that adds
collect_indexicalto all iterators. - Implicit conversions from elements to indexes. Commonly used in the
IndexSetandIndexMatrixinterfaces.