LC

Implement String Interning Pool to Reduce Memory

medium7/8

Visualize Heap Fragmentation with ASCII Art Colors Implement an Arena Allocator for Bulk Deallocation

Language

Compiler

2.0s Limit 256MB

Implementation

Implement string interning pool.

Requirements:

Implement hash table for string storage
Implement intern() function to add/get strings
Use strdup() to create permanent copies
Return pointer to interned string
Detect duplicates efficiently (hash table)
Show memory savings with example
Benchmark string comparison speedup
Demonstrate pointer equality
Print memory usage statistics

Why This Matters

Every production compiler's symbol table (LLVM's StringPool, Python's identifier interning) uses exactly this hash-and-dedupe technique so that identifier comparison during parsing and type-checking is a single pointer compare instead of a strcmp, which matters when a codebase has millions of identifier occurrences. Java's String.intern() and the JVM's constant pool formalize the same idea at the language level, turning what would be O(n) string comparisons into O(1) ones across an entire program.

Hints

0 / 3 revealed

Validation Suite

main.c

Workspace 1.0