Reduce size of Name struct

[appetrosyan]

Name is a repr(transparent) struct wrapping std::string::String, which has a pointer, a length and a capacity.

However, in most cases a name isn't modified, but instead, a new name is created. So in theory we could get rid of capacity, as we don't intend for the Name struct to be mutable (there isn't a single mutable borrow or mutable Name in the code-base).

So we should investigate either using std::str::str or creating a custom structure for storing Names

[Arjentix]

I think we can do something like ConstantString and implement impl From<ConstantString> for String to give possibility to act with it as basic a String.

Also right now Name::new() accepts &str but allocates memory for String inside it. AFAIK Rust convention is to let user decide when to allocate memory. So I think a new constructor should be: pub fn new(name: ConstantString).
If we really want to create Name from &str, then we can use FromStr::from_str() or create Name::from() as it is done for std::str::String

[appetrosyan]

I largely agree, but I have a few comments:

I think we can do something like ConstantString and implement impl From<ConstantString> for String to give possibility to act with it as basic a String.

Only if necessary. The way I see it, a ConstantString should only implement Deref to a string slice. Most functions we're interested in take a slice anyway.

Also right now Name::new() accepts &str but allocates memory for String inside it…

We could try that. IMO it should really be FromStr::parse, because we raise a ParseError.

[mversic]

We could try that. IMO it should really be FromStr::parse, because we raise a ParseError.

Name::new is out the window with #1984

If we'll consider interning of Names as in #2008, which would save us a lot more memory space compared to removing capacity usize, this should become a much more low priority issue

[mversic]

This seems like an interesting and highly maintained crate