string table for pathnames

[Greg McGary]

Hi Paul & all,

I have a very large build system that has 20,847 *.o files, and
therefore the same number of *.d files containing header file
dependencies.  gmake stores entire contents of *.d files, leading to
tremendous bloat.  The aggregate size of the *.d files is approx 60 MB
(approx 2.25 million entries), yet there is only approx 260 KB (approx
7500 entries) of unique content.

I dearly wish for a string table to eliminate the redundancy.
I think a Patricia trie would work well for this application.

Comments?

Greg