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AK: Introduce the new String, replacement for DeprecatedString

DeprecatedString (formerly String) has been with us since the start,
and it has served us well. However, it has a number of shortcomings
that I'd like to address.

Some of these issues are hard if not impossible to solve incrementally
inside of DeprecatedString, so instead of doing that, let's build a new
String class and then incrementally move over to it instead.

Problems in DeprecatedString:

- It assumes string allocation never fails. This makes it impossible
  to use in allocation-sensitive contexts, and is the reason we had to
  ban DeprecatedString from the kernel entirely.

- The awkward null state. DeprecatedString can be null. It's different
  from the empty state, although null strings are considered empty.
  All code is immediately nicer when using Optional<DeprecatedString>
  but DeprecatedString came before Optional, which is how we ended up
  like this.

- The encoding of the underlying data is ambiguous. For the most part,
  we use it as if it's always UTF-8, but there have been cases where
  we pass around strings in other encodings (e.g ISO8859-1)

- operator[] and length() are used to iterate over DeprecatedString one
  byte at a time. This is done all over the codebase, and will *not*
  give the right results unless the string is all ASCII.

How we solve these issues in the new String:

- Functions that may allocate now return ErrorOr<String> so that ENOMEM
  errors can be passed to the caller.

- String has no null state. Use Optional<String> when needed.

- String is always UTF-8. This is validated when constructing a String.
  We may need to add a bypass for this in the future, for cases where
  you have a known-good string, but for now: validate all the things!

- There is no operator[] or length(). You can get the underlying data
  with bytes(), but for iterating over code points, you should be using
  an UTF-8 iterator.

Furthermore, it has two nifty new features:

- String implements a small string optimization (SSO) for strings that
  can fit entirely within a pointer. This means up to 3 bytes on 32-bit
  platforms, and 7 bytes on 64-bit platforms. Such small strings will
  not be heap-allocated.

- String can create substrings without making a deep copy of the
  substring. Instead, the superstring gets +1 refcount from the
  substring, and it acts like a view into the superstring. To make
  substrings like this, use the substring_with_shared_superstring() API.

One caveat:

- String does not guarantee that the underlying data is null-terminated
  like DeprecatedString does today. While this was nifty in a handful of
  places where we were calling C functions, it did stand in the way of
  shared-superstring substrings.
This commit is contained in:
Andreas Kling 2022-12-01 13:27:43 +01:00
parent d50b9165cd
commit a3e82eaad3
Notes: sideshowbarker 2024-07-17 03:42:41 +09:00
10 changed files with 616 additions and 1 deletions

View file

@ -103,6 +103,8 @@ DeprecatedString to_titlecase(StringView);
DeprecatedString invert_case(StringView);
DeprecatedString replace(StringView, StringView needle, StringView replacement, ReplaceMode);
ErrorOr<String> replace(String const&, StringView needle, StringView replacement, ReplaceMode);
size_t count(StringView, StringView needle);
}