The new unique package provides facilites for canonicalizing values (like “interning” or “hash-consing”).
Any value of comparable type may be canonicalized with the new Make[T] function, which produces a reference to a canonical copy of the value in the form of a Handle[T]. Two Handle[T] are equal if and only if the values used to produce the handles are equal, allowing programs to deduplicate values and reduce their memory footprint. Comparing two Handle[T] values is efficient, reducing down to a simple pointer comparison.