ecow's Introduction

ecow

Compact, clone-on-write vector and string.

Types

An EcoVec is a reference-counted thin vector. It takes up one word of space (= 1 usize). Within its allocation it stores a reference count, its length, and its capacity.
An EcoString is a reference-counted string with inline storage. It takes up 16 bytes of space. It has 14 bytes of inline storage and starting from 15 bytes it becomes an EcoVec<u8>.

Example

// This is stored inline.
let small = ecow::EcoString::from("Welcome");

// This spills to the heap, but only once: `big` and `third` share the
// same underlying allocation. Vectors and spilled strings are only
// really cloned upon mutation.
let big = small + " to earth! 🌱";
let mut third = big.clone();

// This allocates again to mutate `third` without affecting `big`.
assert_eq!(third.pop(), Some('🌱'));
assert_eq!(third, "Welcome to earth! ");

Why should I use this instead of ...

Type	Details
`Vec<T>` / `String`	Normal vectors are a great general purpose data structure. But they have a quite big footprint (3 machine words) and are expensive to clone. The `EcoVec` has a bit of overhead for mutation, but is small and cheap to clone.
`Arc<Vec<T>>` / `Arc<String>`	This requires two allocations instead of one and is less convenient to mutate.
`Arc<[T]>` / `Arc<str>`	While this only requires one allocation and has an acceptable footprint with 2 machine words, it isn't mutable.
Small vector	Different trade-off. Great when `T` is small, but expensive to clone when spilled to the heap.
Small string	The `EcoString` combines different small string qualities into a very practical package: It has inline storage, a smaller footprint than a normal `String`, is efficient to clone even when spilled, and at the same time mutable.