[bsder]

> Just as an amusing side note: Common Lisp used to be criticized for the massive size of its libraries and later likewise C++.

Part of "size of libraries" is "mental size of libraries".

And C++ and Lisp and have very large mental spaces for their main core libraries. A "String", for example, carries a huge amount of mental baggage in those languages. In most other languages, a string is extremely straightforward because it was designed into the language from the start.

[missblit]

It's possible I'm just used to it, but I've never found std::string more complicated than, say, python (what's up with unicode in 2 vs 3?) or JavaScript (UTF-16 = surrogate pair pain).

It's essentially a std::vector<char> with a few random convenience features bolted on.

I guess some of the confusing points are: not unicode aware, string literals aren't std::strings by default, c_str returns a pointer to a buffer with length one greater than the string length, and the usual C++ quirks like why is there both data and c_str?

[saagarjha]

> the usual C++ quirks like why is there both data and c_str

The usual C++ response: for backwards compatibility, because data was not required to null-terminate prior to C++11.

[seisvelas]

>In most other languages, a string is extremely straightforward because it was designed into the language from the start.

I think one of the classic advantages of C++ over C is that you have the option of std::string instead of char arrays.

I don't program in C++ so I don't really know but I do a lot of pure C and the strings truly are a mess (despite being VERY straightforward)

[brobdingnagians]

One of the things I like about C++ is that there is the std::string for common uses, but then you can design your own string classes with defined conversions to std::string. Qt adds QString with lots of nice utility methods, UnrealEngine adds optimized string types, etc. So you can have custom tailored classes for the task at hand, but easy to convert around to the different types with std::string conversions defined.

[the_why_of_y]

One of the things I dislike about C++ is that any large project will have lots of code converting between a dozen custom and gratuitously different string types.