telodendria/man/man3/HashMap.3

.Dd $Mdocdate: October 11 2022 $
.Dt HASHMAP 3
.Os Telodendria Project
.Sh NAME
.Nm HashMap
.Nd A simple hash map implementation.
.Sh SYNOPSIS
.In HashMap.h
.Ft HashMap *
.Fn HashMapCreate "void"
.Ft void
.Fn HashMapFree "HashMap *"
.Ft void
.Fn HashMapLoadSet "HashMap *" "float"
.Ft void
.Fn HashMapFunctionSet "HashMap *" "unsigned long (*) (const char *)"
.Ft void *
.Fn HashMapSet "HashMap *" "char *" "void *"
.Ft void *
.Fn HashMapGet "HashMap *" "char *"
.Ft void *
.Fn HashMapDelete "HashMap *" "char *"
.Ft int
.Fn HashMapIterate "HashMap *" "char **" "void **"
.Sh DESCRIPTION
This is the public interface for Telodendria's hash map implementation.
This hash map is designed to be simple, well documented, and generally
readable and understandable, yet also performant enough to be useful,
because it is used extensively in Telodendria.
.Pp
Fundamentally, this is an entirely generic map implementation. It can
be used for many general purposes, but it is designed to only implement
the features that Telodendria needs to function well. One example of a
Telodendria-specific feature is that keys are
.Dv NULL -terminated
strings, not any arbitrary data.
.Pp
These functions operate on an opaque
.Dv HashMap
structure, which the caller has no knowledge about.
.Pp
.Fn HashMapCreate
creates a new hash map that is ready to be used with the rest of the
hash map functions.
.Fn HashMapFree
frees this hash map, such that it becomes invalid and any future use
with the functions in this API results in undefined behavior. Note that
it does not free the keys or values stored in the hash map, since this
implementation has no way of knowing what is actually stored in it, and
where it is located. You should use
.Fn HashMapIterate
to free the values appropriately.
.Pp
.Fn HashMapMaxLoadSet
controls the maximum load of the hash map before it is expanded.
When the hash map reaches the given capacity, it is grown. You don't
want to only grow hash maps when they are full,  because that makes
them perform very poorly. The maximum load value is a percentage of how
full the hash map is, and it should be between 0
and 1, where 0 means that no elements will cause the map to be expanded,
and 1 means that the hash map must be completely full before it is
expanded. The default maximum load on a new
.Dv HashMap
object is 0.75, which should be good enough for most purposes, but
if you need finer tuning, feel free to play with the max load with
this function. The changes take effect on the next insert.
.Pp
.Fn HashMapFunctionSet
allows the given hash map to use a custom hashing function. New hash
maps have a sane hashing function that should work okay for most use
cases, but if you have a better hash function, it can be specified with
this function. Do not change the hash function after keys have been
added; doing so results in undefined behavior. Only set the hash
function immediately after constructing a new hash map.
.Pp
.Fn HashMapSet
sets the given string key to the given value. Note neither the key nor the
value is copied into the hash map's own memory space; only pointers are
stored. It is the caller's job to ensure that the key and value memory
remains valid for the life of the HashMap, and are freed when they are no
longer needed.
.Fn HashMapGet
retrieves the value for the given key and .Fn HashMapDelete
removes a value from a given key.
.Pp
.Fn HashMapIterate
iterates over all the keys and values of a hash map. This function works
very similarly to
.Xr getopt 3 ,
where calls are repeatedly made in a
.Dv while
loop until there are no more items to go over. The difference is that this
function does not rely on globals; it takes pointer pointers, and stores all
necessary state inside the hash map structure itself. Note that this does not
make this function thread-safe; two threads cannot be iterating over any given
hash map at the same time, though they can be iterating over different hash
maps at the same time.
.Pp
This function can be tricky to use in some scenarios, as it continues where
it left off on each call, until there are no more elements to go through in
the hash map. If you are not iterating over the entire map in one go, and
happen to  break the loop, then the next time you attempt to iterate the
hash map, you'll start somewhere in the middle. Thus, it's recommended to
always iterate over the entire hash map if you're going to use this
function. Also note that the behavior of this function is undefined if
insertions or deletions occur during the iteration. It may work fine; it may
not. That functionality has not been tested.
.Pp
.Fn HashMapIterate
takes a pointer to a string ponter, and a pointer to a value pointer. When
iterating over the keys and values of the hash map, it sets these pointers
to the current position in the map so that the caller can use them for his
own purposes.
.Sh RETURN VALUES
.Fn HashMapCreate
may return
.Dv NULL
if memory could not be allocated on the heap. Otherwise, it returns a
valid pointer to a
.Dv HashMap
structure which can be used with the other functions in this API.
.Pp
.Fn HashMapSet
returns the previous value at the passed key, or
.Dv NULL
if no such value exists. All keys must have values; you can't set a key
to
.Dv NULL .
To delete a key, use the
.Fn HashMapDelete
function.
.Pp
.Fn HashMapDelete
returns the value that was deleted from the hash map at the given key,
or
.Dv NULL
if no such value exists.
.Pp
.Fn HashMapIterate
returns 1 if there are still elements left in the current iteration of the
hash map, or 0 if no valid hash map was provided, or there are no more elements
in it for the current iteration. Note that as soon as this function returns 0
on a hash map, subsequent iterations will start from the beginning.
.Sh SEE ALSO
.Xr HashMap 3 ,
.Xr Queue 3