Add an explicit `Name` type

Fixes #23

Up to this point, the compiler has used the ordinary `String` type to represent declaration names, which means a bunch of lookup structures throughout the compiler were string-to-whatever maps, which can reduce efficiency.
It also means that things like the `Token` type end up carying a `String` by value and paying for things like reference-counting.

This change adds a `Name` type that is used to represent names of variables, types, macros, etc.
Names are cached and unique'd globally for a session, and the string-to-name mapping gets done during lexing.
From that point on, most mapping is from pointers, which should make all the various table lookups faster.

More importantly (possibly), this brings us one step closer to being able to pool-allocate the AST nodes.

1 files changed, 18 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/source/slang/token.cpp b/source/slang/token.cpp
index 69baf5e70..42f7ab55f 100644
--- a/source/slang/token.cpp
+++ b/source/slang/token.cpp
@@ -5,6 +5,24 @@
 
 namespace Slang {
 
+
+Name* Token::getName() const
+{
+    return getNameOrNull();
+}
+
+Name* Token::getNameOrNull() const
+{
+    switch (type)
+    {
+    default:
+        return nullptr;
+
+    case TokenType::Identifier:
+        return (Name*) ptrValue;
+    }
+}
+
 char const* TokenTypeToString(TokenType type)
 {
     switch( type )