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Expose API for building Atom feeds without excessive allocation

Open SabrinaJewson opened this issue 3 years ago • 0 comments

Building an Atom feed currently incurs many many allocations. Nearly every field of the type contains a String which mandates it be a separate and unique heap allocation. What's more, since all the .build() methods take &self they mandate cloning every single field in the builder. I think it would be good if atom_syndicator exposed a separate *Writer API for enabling feed-building without allocations. A sketch of what the API could look like is below:

pub struct FeedWriter<W> { /* ... */ }

impl<W: Write> FeedWriter<W> {
    pub fn from_writer(writer: W) -> Self { /* ... */ }

    pub fn title(&mut self) -> Result<TextWriter<'_, W>, Error> { /* set up the opening of a text tag */ }
    pub fn id<Id: Display>(&mut self, id: Id) -> Result<&mut Self, Error> { /* ... */ }
    // etc

    // Automatically runs in the destructor of `FeedWriter`, but can be called here to handle errors.
    pub fn finish(self) -> Result<W, Error> { /* ... */ }
}

pub struct TextWriter<'a, W: Write> { /* ... */ }

impl<W: Write> TextWriter<'_, W> {
    pub fn set<Value: Into<Text>>(self, text: Value) -> Result<(), Error> { /* ... */ }
    pub fn value<Value: Display>(&mut self, value: Value) -> Result<&mut Self, Error> { /* ... */ }
    pub fn base<Base: Display>(&mut self, base: Base) -> Result<&mut Self, Error> { /* ... */ }
    // etc
}

impl<W: Write> Drop for TextWriter<'_, W> {
    fn drop(&mut self) {
        // finish writing out the text tag

        // In lieu of fallible destructors, errors from here can be pushed
        // up into the FeedWriter and returned on the next call to any one
        // of its methods.
    }
}

Such an API would be usable like so:

let mut feed = FeedWriter::new(Vec::new());
feed.title()?.value("My example feed")?;
feed.id("http://example.com/")?;
feed.generator()?.value("My generator")?.version("1.0.0")?;
for entry in ["entry 1", "entry 2"] {
    feed.entry()?.content()?.value(entry)?;
}
let bytes = feed.finish()?;

As an alternative design, it's possible to collate all errors within the FeedWriter so that each individual method doesn't return a Result, but instead the first error is returned at .finish(). However that would mean it could force the user to do a lot more work than they need to do, since early returns on error conditions would not be possible.

Would such an API be possible to implement?

SabrinaJewson avatar Mar 06 '22 19:03 SabrinaJewson