17.5 - Symbol Strings

The DtSymbolString class (symStr.h), and related classes, provide a way to treat strings as symbols instead of as ordinary strings.

When a symbol string is created from a string, the string is stored inside of a table of strings and the symbol string is given a key with which to get the associated string from the table. As a result, unique strings are stored only once. This can result in significant memory savings if many instances of the same string were formerly stored in the system. Additionally, because each symbol string references its string by a key, string comparison becomes key comparison (much more efficient). In general, the symbol string classes are used in the reader/writer classes and the DtSpecification classes. You should not have to update code to use the DtSymbolStrings, other than to provide the appropriate functions if any classes were derived from reader/writer classes implementing member functions using DtSymbolStrings.

The symbol string classes and header files, which are in gdb.lib, are:

• DtSymbolStore (symbolStore.h) - The repository of unique symbols. Used, as a singleton, by the symbol string class.
• DtSymbolString - The core symbol string class.
• DtCStringHashKey (cstringHashKey.h) - A string hash key based upon symbol strings, instead of full strings.

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