Magic String

This magicstring package is designed to attach arbitrary data to a Go built-in string type and read the data later. The string with attached data is called "magic string" here.

Usage

Attach data and then read it

Call Attach to attach data to a string and Read to read the attached data in the magic string. Read is thread-safe and extremely fast.

type T struct {
    Name string
}

s1 := "Hello, world!"
data := &T{Name: "Kanon"}
s2 := Attach(s1, data)

attached := Read(s2).(*T)
fmt.Println(s1 == s2)         // true
fmt.Println(attached == data) // true

Check whether a string is a magic string

Call Is if we want to know whether a string is a magic string, .

s1 := "ordinary string"
s2 := Attach("magic string", 123)
s3 := s2
s4 := fmt.Sprint(s2)

fmt.Println(Is(s1)) // false
fmt.Println(Is(s2)) // true
fmt.Println(Is(s3)) // true
fmt.Println(Is(s4)) // false

Replace the attached data

Call Replace if we want to replace the attached data to a new one in a magic string. As Replace modifies the payload in a magic string, this call will affect all copies of this magic string and is not thread-safe.

s := Attach("magic string", 123)
fmt.Println(Read(s)) // 123

success := Replace(s, "replaced")
fmt.Println(success) // true
fmt.Println(Read(s)) // replaced

Copy a magic string

In general, we can use a magic string like an ordinary string. The attached data will be kept during all kinds of assignments. However, if we copy the content of a string to a buffer and create a new string from the buffer, we will lose the attached data.

s1 := Attach("magic string", 123)
buf := make([]byte, len(s1))
copy(buf, s1)
s2 := string(buf)

fmt.Println(Is(s1)) // true
fmt.Println(Is(s2)) // false

The simplest way to create an ordinary string from a magic string is to call Detach. This function is optimized for ordinary strings. If a string is not a magic string, the Detach simply returns the string to avoid an unnecessary memory allocation and memory copy.

Slice a magic string

A magic string cannot be sliced by built-in slice expression. If we want to keep the attachment in a magic string, we must call Slice to slice it. If a string is not a magic string, Slice just works the same as slice expression.

Performance

Memory allocation is highly optimized for small strings. The maximum size of a small string is 18,408 bytes right now. It's the maximum size of memory span classes, which is 18,432 bytes provided by runtime.ReadMemStats(), minus the size of magic string payload struct, which is 24 bytes right now.

Here is the performance data running on my MacBook.

goos: darwin
goarch: amd64
pkg: github.com/huandu/go-magicstring
cpu: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-9750H CPU @ 2.60GHz
BenchmarkAttachSmallString-12       12312567     83.78 ns/op       32 B/op   1 allocs/op
BenchmarkAttachLarge1MBString-12        8511    165978 ns/op  1057046 B/op   3 allocs/op
BenchmarkReplaceSmallString-12      225952905    5.329 ns/op        0 B/op   0 allocs/op
BenchmarkReplaceLarge1MBString-12   228580016    5.268 ns/op        0 B/op   0 allocs/op
BenchmarkReadSmallString-12         312613485    3.915 ns/op        0 B/op   0 allocs/op
BenchmarkReadLarge1MBString-12      301951902    3.964 ns/op        0 B/op   0 allocs/op

License

This package is licensed under MIT license. See LICENSE for details.