This was split off from the long thread in #46 as a separate piece of work.

The goal would be to create a struct that is dedicated to storing strings for identifiers. Since identifiers are one of the most commonly stored strings and they tend to be short (<16 bytes on average?), we can make different performance tradeoffs that wouldn't make sense for general purpose strings.

This would also enable some other related ideas like identifier interning, but this issue is just focused on adding the new type itself.

Reference

• @overlookmotel's initial thoughts: Make Atom<'a> and CompactString nice and fast #46 (comment)