A simple Rust library for storing data indexed by a chromosome name

genomap is a small library for storing a key-value map between chromosome names and some generic data in a GenomeMap. Since in nearly every case we want chromosomes to be sorted by their names, GenomeMap maintains an internal sorted set of keys. GenomeMap uses a specialized chromosome name sorting function that should properly sort autosomes, sex chromosomes, handle Drosophila Chromosome names (e.g. 2L and 2R), etc. Please file a GitHub issue if the sort order is not as you'd anticipate.

Internally, the data stored in a genomap::GenomeMap<T> is in a Vec<T>, and the type maintains a sorted list of chromosome names, and a forward and reverse lookup table that associated the position in the Vec to the chromosome's name.

Below is a code example:

use genomap::GenomeMap;

let mut sm: GenomeMap<i32> = GenomeMap::new();
sm.insert("chr1", 1).unwrap();
sm.insert("chr2", 2).unwrap();

// get a reference to a value by name
println!("{:?}", sm.get("chr1"));

// iterate through name/values
for (name, value) in sm.iter() {
   println!("{} -> {}", name, value);
}

// get the index for a chromosome name
let index = sm.get_index_by_name("chr1").unwrap();
assert_eq!(index, 0);

// get a name by index
assert_eq!(sm.get_name_by_index(index).unwrap(), "chr1");

In Rust, working with non-Copyable types, such as a String chromosome name key, can necessitate generic lifetime annotations. This can clutter code and increase complexity significantly. To prevent this, genomap has O(1) access by a usize index, so a chromosome name index can be stored in Structs rather than the String key.

Performance

Multiple creation and access benchmarks are available in benches/comparison.rs. Here is a small highlight of a sample of benchmarks. For creation time, GenomeMap is about 20% slower. But this is incurred once (and the absolute scale is insignificant).

GenomeMap has the second fastest sorted access times (it uses FnvHashMap's hasher internally, but there's one additional constant lookup time operation).