A thread-safe symbol table (string table) for Go
A string table turns strings into numbers, and back again. Popularised by LISP and Scheme, a string table is an efficient (and sometimes quick) way to store a lot of strings, when many of them are expected to be identical. e.g. when parsing a program, function and variable names are usually put into a symbol table.
It works like a hashmap, but it is lock-free to read from multiple threads(unlike Go hashmaps). Unlike a normal map, a string table works both ways, which is why it is restricted to strings.
Going from a symbol(a number) to string is an array lookup, so almost instant.
Going from a string to a number requires a lookup in a Patricia (radix) tree, which means the time should be roughly log(n), where n is the number of stored strings.
Adding a string is very slow, for various reasons, so it is best used in situations where the reads will vastly outnumber the writes.
import "github.com/donomii/goStringTable"
s := goStringTable.New()
n := s.LookupOrCreate("Hello World")
fmt.Println(s.GetString(n))
or lookup a string without creating it
sym, err := s.Lookup("Hello World")