Put headers in a map rather than an array.

[pygy]

Having headers in a map makes them easier to work with for library users.

The order of headers is irrelevant, and, when the same header appears several times, the last one takes precedence.

As a consequence, you can populate the map on the go when you parse the headers, the parsing code remains very simple.

[jjeffery]

Yes, this would be a good implementation if the STOMP specification was that the last header takes precedence. However it does not. Check out http://stomp.github.io/stomp-specification-1.2.html#Repeated_Header_Entries.

If a client or a server receives repeated frame header entries, only the first header entry SHOULD be used as the value of header entry. Subsequent values are only used to maintain a history of state changes of the header and MAY be ignored.
For example, if the client receives:

MESSAGE
foo:World
foo:Hello

^@

The value of the foo header is just World.

[jjeffery]

If I were to implement this again, I would base it on the excellent code in the "net/textproto" package in the golang standard library. STOMP has a few differences (ie case-sensitive, white space sensitive) but the basics of the header handling would be similar to this package. See http://golang.org/src/pkg/net/textproto/