@hackage symbolize1.0.3.1

Symbols, also known as Atoms or Interned Strings, are a common technique to reduce memory usage and improve performance when using many small strings:

A Symbol represents a string (any Textual, so String, Text, ShortText, ByteString, ShortByteString, etc.)

Just like ShortText, ShortByteString and ByteArray, a Symbol has an optimized memory representation, directly wrapping a primitive ByteArray#.

Furthermore, a global symbol table keeps track of which values currently exist, ensuring we always deduplicate symbols. This therefore allows us to:

• Check for equality between symbols in constant-time (using pointer equality)

• Calculate the hash in constant-time (using StableName)

• Keep the memory footprint of repeatedly-seen strings low.

This is very useful if you're frequently comparing strings and the same strings might come up many times. It also makes Symbol a great candidate for a key in e.g. a HashMap or HashSet.

The global symbol table is implemented using weak pointers, which means that unused symbols will be garbage collected. As such, you do not need to be concerned about memory leaks (as is the case with many other symbol table implementations).

Please see the full README below or on GitHub at https://github.com/Qqwy/haskell-symbolize#readme