Crate internment

A very easy to use library for interning strings or other data in rust. Interned data is very efficient to either hash or compare for equality (just a pointer comparison). Data is also automatically de-duplicated.

You have three options with the internment crate:

1. Intern, which will never free your data. This means that an Intern is Copy, so you can make as many copies of the pointer as you may care to at no cost.

2. ArcIntern, which reference-counts your data and frees it when there are no more references. ArcIntern will keep memory use down, but uses an atomic increment/decrement whenever a clone of your pointer is made, or a pointer is dropped.

3. ArenaIntern, which stores its data in an Arena, with the data being freed when the arena itself is freed. Requires feature arena.

In each case, accessing your data is a single pointer dereference, and the size of any internment data structure (Intern or ArcIntern or ArenaIntern) is a single pointer. In each case, you have a guarantee that a single data value (as defined by Eq and Hash) will correspond to a single pointer value. This means that we can use pointer comparison (and a pointer hash) in place of value comparisons, which is very fast.

Example

use internment::Intern;
let x = Intern::new("hello");
let y = Intern::new("world");
assert_ne!(x, y);
println!("The conventional greeting is '{} {}'", x, y);

Structs

• Intern
  A pointer to an interned object