Proposal: Add FromIterator impl for HashMap<K, Vec<V>>
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Description
Summary
I'm proposing a small quality of life improvement, that I was surprised to find wasn't already a part of the language.
I want to introduce a new FromIterator<(K, V)> implementation for HashMap<K, Vec<V>>.
I'm happy to create a PR for this if we want to move forward.
Note: I tried asking this on internals, without any responses, so am hoping to get more traction here.
Motivation
It's relatively common to want to group a list of values over some specific key. The current method of doing this either requires a third party crate or manually constructing the HashMap in a for loop, making use of the Entry API.
This is common enough that I was surprised not to see an ergonomic approach using collect. This RFC proposes adding an impl to make this possible.
Example
As an example, imagine you had a list of books, and wanted to group the books by the author that wrote them.
Current Implementation
let mut books_by_author: HashMap<&str, Vec<&Book>> = HashMap::new();
for book in &books {
books_by_author.entry(book.author).or_default().push(book);
}
With This Proposal
let books_by_author: HashMap<&str, Vec<&Book>> =
books.iter().map(|book| (book.author, book)).collect();
Future Considerations
- Instead of adding this implementation for just
Vec<V>, we could consider adding it for all collectionsC: Default + Extend<V>, extending this functionality to all collections, such as aHashSet.
Prior Art
Contributor guide
No contributing guide indexed for this repository
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start with the proposal's FromIterator<HashMap<K, Vec>> examples and compare the existing HashMap Entry API with the linked multimap and itertools prior art. Determine whether the narrow implementation or the broader Default + Extend design fits the RFC process; done means a resolved RFC direction rather than an implementation patch.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- rust
- Domain
- compilers
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 35/100