Support paths without trailing nulls
robin-nitrokey opened this issue · 1 comments
Once factor that makes dealing with Paths somewhat awkward at the moment is the requirement for a trailing null. For example, I cannot have a split_at(&self, n: usize) -> (&Path, &Path) function because the first part would not have a trailing null. But allocating a PathBuf would often be wasteful because it might be discarded directly, or may only be used for comparison and not for a littlefs2 API call.
We could support this by introducing a third path type that does not require a trailing null, let’s call it PathView. It could be created without overhead from a PathBuf or Path and could be used for comparison. To use it with a littefs2 API call, it would need to be converted to a PathBuf.
Do you think it is worth having a separate type for this or should we just accept the current limitations?
An alternative could be to make the trailing null byte in Path optional. littlefs2 could then internally copy paths to a buffer to add the trailing null if needed.