So I have had a few ides that have fallen flat so take this with a gain of salt. What if some string methods did not return strings but a struct with pointers into strings. Strings are immutable so there should not be case were an existing string would change and invalidate a view. Consider the c…

This idea does come up every now and then. It’s a really clever way to negate a lot of intermediate string allocations, to be sure. However, I believe the reason it hasn’t been implemented is that as long as any StringView based on it remains in memory, the original String cannot be GCed. In a lot …

More discussion here: [image] More slices, less alloc? Crystal Contrib Maybe it could be faster with some concept of just “pointing” to a Slice (i.e. sub slice) within a different (parent) String object? Java used to do this optimization. It ended up being problematic f…

If the idea is to reduce allocations for strings used multiple times, could look into StringPool - Crystal 1.10.1 . Maybe not applicable here, but it is one of those types that is easy to miss.

String views or some pointer into strings

Help & Support

HertzDevil December 3, 2023, 6:35am 3

More discussion here:

Topic		Replies	Views
More slices, less alloc? Crystal Contrib	11	1039	October 26, 2022
String is a Class, why? Help & Support	3	482	December 3, 2022
Why aren't strings pooled? Help & Support	5	586	December 10, 2020
Ongoing experiment: ident pool Community	13	728	July 21, 2022
Running Crystal without a GC (a.k.a. leaking memory) Community	9	2160	January 4, 2021

String views or some pointer into strings

Related topics