A Hash-String module for the Jai programming language. You can check the code in module.jai and examples of use in example.jai.
The idea behind this is to replace using strings with integers. These come as a result of hashing the original string. This is a well known technique that leverages the advantages that a constant-sized, small integer has over a string of arbitrary length such as faster comparisons, smaller storage, avoiding dynamic memory allocations, etc.
This is very common in the database world, asset management or in general in real-time applications. You can see good examples of other implementations here by foonathan and here by TheAllenChou.
Creating a Hash_String is as easy as calling make_hash_string. You can also call this at compile time if you want a constant.
name := make_hash_string("Alice");
NAME :: #run make_hash_string("Bob");
If you compiled with ORIGINAL_STRINGS = true you can retrieve back the string from a hash:
name := make_hash_string("Alice");
original_string := get_string(name);
assert(name == original_string);
That's pretty much the basics! There's more examples in the example file and more options in the module parameters in case you want to serialize these, parse them, configure how (or if) to save the original strings to access them based on the hash, etc.
One cool feature that the language allows us to do is that if it determines that the input to make_hash_string is constant, it'll be hashed at compile-time, so the call to make_hash_string that happens at runtime is essentially a no-op.
I want people to be able to just use this without thinking about licensing, although give me a shout if you do use it and attribution is appreciated 😊. Replicating STB's (https://github.com/nothings/stb) licensing stuff where you can choose to use public domain or MIT.