[mwsherman]

In Go, string effectively serves as a read-only slice, if we are talking about bytes.

ReadOnlySpan<T> in C# is great! In my opinion, Go essentially designed in “span” from the start.

[jasonthorsness]

Yeah I think the C# team was definitely influenced by Go with their addition of Spans..

Interesting approach regarding using strings as containers for raw bytes, but when you create one over a []byte I believe it makes a copy almost always (always?) so you can’t get a zero-cost read-only view of the data to pass to other functions.

[mwsherman]

That’s true, converting in either direction will typically allocate. Which it must, semantically.

One can use unsafe for a zero-copy conversion, but now you are breaking the semantics: a string becomes mutable, because its underlying bytes are mutable.

Or! One can often handle strings and bytes interchangeably with generics: https://github.com/clipperhouse/stringish

[pjmlp]

Like everything else in Go, spans predate it for a few decades.

[pjmlp]

System languages from 1980's already had the span concept.

One way that you will find it is that they used to be called open arrays in some of them.