Previously we insisted on using breadcrumbs even if we only needed to
travel a very short way. This could be as much as ten times slower
than the naive algorithm of simply visiting all the Unicode scalars
in between the start and the end.
(Using breadcrumbs generally means that we need to walk to both
endpoints from their nearest breadcrumb, which on average requires
walking half the distance between breadcrumbs — and this can mean
visiting vastly more Unicode scalars than the ones that are simply
lying in between the endpoints themselves.)
* Don't allocate breadrumbs pointer if under threshold
* Increase breadrumbs threshold
* Linear 16-byte bucketing until 128 bytes, malloc_size after
* Allow cap less than _SmallString.capacity (bridging non-ASCII)
This change decreases the amount of heap usage for moderate-length
strings (< 64 UTF-8 code units in length) and increases the amount of
spare code unit capacity available (less growth needed).
Average improvements for moderate-length strings:
* 64-bit: on average, 8 bytes saved and 4 bytes of extra capacity
* 32-bit: on average, 4 bytes saved and 6 bytes of extra capacity
Additionally, on 32-bit, large-length strings also gain an average of
6 bytes of extra spare capacity.
Details:
On 64-bit, half of moderate-length allocations will save 16 bytes
while the other half get an extra 8 bytes of spare capacity.
On 32-bit, a quarter of moderate-length allocations will save 16
bytes, and the rest get an extra 4 bytes of spare
capacity. Additionally, 32-bit string's storage class now claims its
full allocation, which is its birthright. Prior to this change, we'd
have on average 1.5 bytes of spare capacity, and now we have 7.5 bytes
of spare capacity.
Breadcrumbs threshold is increased from the super-conservative 32 to
the pretty-conservative 64. Some speed improvements are incorporated
in this change, but more are in flight. Even without those eventual
improvements, this is a worthwhile change (ASCII is still fast-pathed
and irrelevant to breadcrumbing).
For a complex real-world workload, this amounts to around a 5%
improvement to transient heap usage due to all strings and a 4%
improvement to peak heap usage due to all strings. For moderate-length
strings specifically, this gives around 11% improvement to both.
String.Index has an encodedOffset-based initializer and computed
property that exists for serialization purposes. It was documented as
UTF-16 in the SE proposal introducing it, which was String's
underlying encoding at the time, but the dream of String even then was
to abstract away whatever encoding happend to be used.
Serialization needs an explicit encoding for serialized indices to
make sense: the offsets need to align with the view. With String
utilizing UTF-8 encoding for native contents in Swift 5, serialization
isn't necessarily the most efficient in UTF-16.
Furthermore, the majority of usage of encodedOffset in the wild is
buggy and operates under the assumption that a UTF-16 code unit was a
Swift Character, which isn't even valid if the String is known to be
all-ASCII (because CR-LF).
This change introduces a pair of semantics-preserving alternatives to
encodedOffset that explicitly call out the UTF-16 assumption. These
serve as a gentle off-ramp for current mis-uses of encodedOffset.
After rebasing on master and incorporating more 32-bit support,
perform a bunch of cleanup, documentation updates, comments, move code
back to String declaration, etc.
