[Haskell-cafe] Trying to reduce memory costs of String duplicates

[Günther Schmidt]

Hi all,

I'm reading in a data of 216k records into a map of Key, Values Pairs, the  
values being strings.

As it happens out of 216k String values there really are only about 6.6k  
distinct string values, so I could save a lot of RAM if I was able to  
"insert" only actually *new* string values into the map and use references  
to (string) values that already are in memory instead.

Is there a container that would, if I wanted to insert an element, return  
a pair of either the previously inserted, equal value and the container  
unchanged, or the new, previously unknown value and the new container  
amended by that element?

Günther