Light's Intern Strings

Discontinued

Intern strings have been discontinued in light. They may be revisited later, but for now are not included in the library.

Intern Strings are a relatively simple & lightweight datatype. They serve to save resources on serialization/deserialization of repeated "arbitrary" strings. This is done by holding onto an optional intern string "index" for each stream. This looks something like:

local index = intern_str_match[string_data]
if not index then
    table.insert(intern_str_batch, string_data)
    index = #intern_str_batch
    str_ptr_index[string_data] = index
end
serialize_u16(index)

This means every intern string will be a "static" datatype, allowing strings to be reallocation merged. Using the same intern string in multiple places can also help compression, and speed up serialization/deserialization, because there is only one readstring/writestring call for each unique interned string used in a stream.

In the future, this might be expanded to a broader system which holds onto interned strings persistently between frames.