mozilla/rust — pull request #2583 by brson (2012-06-13 18:20:54+00:00)
Title: Box AST idents

This commit converts `ast::ident` into a boxed string with the intent of avoiding copies (at the expense of more refcounting, and another level of indirection through the box). The end goal is to convert idents into interned, boxed strings to avoid expensive string comparisons.

This makes the code considerably uglier with lots of boxing and dereferencing. It cuts 2% at most from rustc compile times.