- Rename the filename parameter to name and make it mandatory. Review all callers and ensure a useful string is provided as input, to ensure sufficient context is included for logging and debugging. This can be a filename, url, or any arbitrary text so include whatever context seems reasonable.
- When several MiniYamls are created that have similar content, provide a shared string pool. This allows strings that are common between all the yaml to be shared, reducing long term memory usage. We also change the pool from a dictionary to a set. Originally a Dictionary had to be used so we could call TryGetValue to get a reference to the pooled string. Now that more recent versions of dotnet provide a TryGetValue on HashSet, we can use a set directly without the memory wasted by having to store both keys and values in a dictionary.
This changeset is motivated by a simple concept - get rid of the MiniYaml.Clone and MiniYamlNode.Clone methods to avoid deep copying yaml trees during merging. MiniYaml becoming immutable allows the merge function to reuse existing yaml trees rather than cloning them, saving on memory and improving merge performance. On initial loading the YAML for all maps is processed, so this provides a small reduction in initial loading time.
The rest of the changeset is dealing with the change in the exposed API surface. Some With* helper methods are introduced to allow creating new YAML from existing YAML. Areas of code that generated small amounts of YAML are able to transition directly to the immutable model without too much ceremony. Some use cases are far less ergonomic even with these helper methods and so a MiniYamlBuilder is introduced to retain mutable creation functionality. This allows those areas to continue to use the old mutable structures. The main users are the update rules and linting capabilities.
