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2026

Sometimes I Need to Store a Lot of Strings Efficiently, So I Built lite-strtab

This post is about a very specific problem.

Storing many short, long-lived strings in an immutable (read-only) container.
All while keeping memory overhead low and lookup performance practical.

Every once in a while I run into the same problem: I have a lot of strings to keep, and I want to save a bunch of memory.

Think of stuff like:

  • A catalog or database snapshot you download to see what is available
  • Your game's localisation strings
  • Static lists of paths, endpoints, or keys

Something you load once, keep around for a while, and query every once in a while.