Building a SQL Lexer in Rust: Why I Replaced `Vec ` with `&str` and `Ident(String)` with Spans

I've been building a database engine from scratch in Rust, and I recently finished the lexer. The lexer itself wasn't the most interesting part. What I found more valuable was how my design evolved as I learned more about Rust and how compilers and database systems are typically implemented. My First Approach When I started, I stored the input as a Vec<char> . It felt straightforward because I could access characters directly without worrying about UTF-8 boundaries. I also represented identifiers like this: Ident ( String ) At first glance, this seems perfectly reasonable. Every identifier token carries its own text, making it easy for the parser to consume. The Problem As the lexer grew, I started asking myself a simple question: The identifier already exists in the original SQL query. Why am I allocating another string and copying the same data into every token? For a query like: SELECT username , email FROM users ; the source text already contains: username email users Creating separate String allocations for each identifier means duplicating data that already exists. I also learned an important detail about Rust enums. The size of an enum is influenced by its largest variant. Once variants start carrying additional data, every token instance becomes larger than it otherwise needs to be. Moving to a Span-Based Design Instead of storing identifier text directly inside tokens, I switched to storing only the token kind: Ident along with source location information: Span { start , end , line , column , } Now the token only answers two questions: What is this token? Where did it come from? If the parser needs the actual identifier text, it can recover it directly from the original SQL source using the stored byte range. Replacing Vec<char> with &str The second design change was moving away from: Vec < char > and operating directly on: & str using lifetimes. Instead of creating another collection containing the entire input, the lexer now walks over borrowed source tex