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, 1 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/source/slang/type-layout.h b/source/slang/type-layout.h
index 7d037b2e7..8a034b5a6 100644
--- a/source/slang/type-layout.h
+++ b/source/slang/type-layout.h
@@ -228,7 +228,7 @@ public:
     DeclRef<VarDeclBase>          varDecl;
     VarDeclBase* getVariable() { return varDecl.getDecl(); }
 
-    String const& getName() { return getVariable()->getName(); }
+    Name* getName() { return getVariable()->getName(); }
 
     // The result of laying out the variable's type
     RefPtr<TypeLayout>      typeLayout;