A string type for minimizing data-transfer costs in Julia
The package is registered in the General registry and so can be installed with Pkg.add.
julia> using Pkg; Pkg.add("WeakRefStrings")The package is tested against Julia 1.6 and nightly on Linux, OS X, and Windows.
Contributions are very welcome, as are feature requests and suggestions. Please open an issue if you encounter any problems or would just like to ask a question.
A set of custom string types of various fixed sizes. Each inline string is a custom primitive type and can benefit from being stack friendly by avoiding allocations/heap tracking in the GC. When used in an array, the elements are able to be stored inline since each one has a fixed size. Currently support inline strings from 1 byte up to 255 bytes.
The following types are supported: String1, String3, String7, String15,
String31, String63, String127, String255.
A custom string representation that takes a byte buffer (buf), poslen, and
e escape character, and lazily allows treating a region of the buf as a
string. Can be used most efficiently as part of a PosLenStringVector which
only stores an array of PosLen (inline) along with a single buf and e and
returns PosLenString when indexing individual elements.
Usage of WeakRefStrings is discouraged for general users. Currently, a
WeakRefString purposely does not implement many Base Julia String interface
methods due to many recent changes to Julia's builtin String interface, as well
as the complexity to do so correctly. As such, WeakRefStrings are used
primarily in the data ecosystem as an IO optimization and nothing more. Upon
indexing a WeakRefStringArray, a proper Julia String type is materialized
for safe, correct string processing. In the future, it may be possible to
implement safe operations on WeakRefString itself, but for now, they must be
converted to a String for any real work.
Additional documentation is available at the REPL for ?WeakRefStringArray and
?WeakRefString.