[barrkel]

You're imagining a false dichotomy. Having a proper string type doesn't stop you from representing strings as pointers to null-terminated buffers when you need it for the flexibility. Meanwhile, more or less encouraging all software written in the language to use an unsafe idiom (so unsafe that the library itself includes functions that should never be used, like gets()), definitely is responsible for a huge amount of harm.

[apaprocki]

Well what are your thoughts on the example I gave for hash_map? There is always a tradeoff hidden away somewhere. I guess I'd like to see an example of a concrete string type that doesn't incur performance penalties when used in more complex structures. C++11 move semantics / emplace() on containers will fix some of the performance issues with std::string, but support for that everywhere is a ways off. But in C, you'd be left with something like glib's GString which isn't more than API over a struct.

[barrkel]

I think your example is irrelevant - to the general case, which is where a string type is useful. If you need to avoid copies that badly in a specific case, don't use std::string or anything like it.

For example, I know of one compiler architecture which scanned strings from the source, all the while calculating a hash, and basically interned the string (turning it into an index per unique string) without ever actually copying it. Thereafter, the program used the index (an integer) to represent the string, making for fast lookups and comparisons.

[apaprocki]

I guess I just take issue with saying the "general case" usage of strings does not have to avoid copies. That is how we generally wind up with slow, bloated software.

[barrkel]

I don't think most software is particularly slow or bloated. It's been quite some time since I thought to myself, "gee, this software could do with being a lot faster", outside of games and video transcoders (and perhaps iTunes on Windows). On the other hand, a lot of software has buffer overflow vulnerabilities; I see a lot of crashes when input data is fuzzed or corrupted slightly.

[lurker19]

Fast enough is a very recent development. Until 2005 and dual core, computers were not fast enough, especially computers running objective-C.