StringPool

The StringPool type implements a configurable pool for string instances. This can be used to minimize allocations when creating multiple string instances from buffers of char or byte values. It provides a mechanism that is somewhat similar to string interning, with the main differences being that the pool is configurable, can be reset, is implemented with a best-effort policy and doesn't require to pre-instantiate string objects, so it can save the initial allocations as well when working on temporary buffers.

Platform APIs: StringPool

Syntax

The main entry point for StringPool is its GetOrAdd(ReadOnlySpan<char>) API, which returns a string instance matching the contents of the input ReadOnlySpan<char>, possibly getting the returned object from the internal pool.

As an example, imagine we have an input string representing the URL of a given web request, and we want to also retrieve a string with just the host name. If we get a large number of requests possibly for a small number of hosts, we might want to cache those string instances, we can do so by using the StringPool type as follows:

public static string GetHost(string url)
{
    // We assume the input might start either with eg. https:// (or other prefix),
    // or directly with the host name. Furthermore, we also assume that the input
    // URL will always have a '/' character right after the host name.
    // For instance: "https://learn.microsoft.com/dotnet/api/system.string.intern".
    int
        prefixOffset = url.AsSpan().IndexOf(stackalloc char[] { ':', '/', '/' }),
        startIndex = prefixOffset == -1 ? 0 : prefixOffset + 3,
        endIndex = url.AsSpan(startIndex).IndexOf('/');

    // In this example, it would be "learn.microsoft.com"
    ReadOnlySpan<char> span = url.AsSpan(startIndex, endIndex);

    return StringPool.Shared.GetOrAdd(span);
}

The method above does no allocations at all if the requested string is already present in the cache, as the lookup is done with just a ReadOnlySpan<char> as input, representing a view on the input URL string.

The StringPool type can also be useful when parsing raw requests using a different encoding, for instance UTF8. There is a GetOrAdd overload that takes an input ReadOnlySpan<byte> and an Encoding instance, which uses a temporary buffer rented from the pool to retrieve a ReadOnlySpan<char> value to use for the lookup. This again can greatly reduce the number of allocations depending on the specific use case scenario.

Examples

You can find more examples in the unit tests.