[aDyslecticCrow]

Interesting to see a deepdive about string formats. I hadn't thought very deeply about it before.

I do agree with the string imutable argument. Mutable and imutable strings have different usecases and design tradeoffs. They perhaps shouldn't be the same type at all.

The transient string is particularly brilliant. Ive worked with some low level networking code in c, and being able to create a string containing the "payload" by pointing directly to an offset in the raw circular packet buffer is very clean. (the alternative is juggling offsets, or doing excessive memcpy)

So beyond the database usecase it's a clever string format.

It would be nice to have an ISO or equivalent specification on it though.

[masklinn]

> The transient string is particularly brilliant. Ive worked with some low level networking code in c, and being able to create a string containing the "payload" by pointing directly to an offset in the raw circular packet buffer is very clean. (the alternative is juggling offsets, or doing excessive memcpy)

It's not anything special? That's just `string_view` (C++17). Java also used to do that as an optimisation (but because it was implicit and not trivial to notice it caused difficult do diagnose memory leaks, IIRC it was introduced in Java 1.4 and removed in 1.7).

[aDyslecticCrow]

> It's not anything special? That's just `string_view` (C++17)

Just because something already exists in some language doesn't make it less clever. It's not very widespread, and it's very powerful when applicable.

This format can handle "string views" with the same logic as "normal strings" without relying on interfaces or inheritance overhead.

it's clever.

[tracker1]

I never really put much thought into it either, until I started playing with Rust, which pretty much supports every common way to use strings out there. Mostly for compatibility sake, but still, it's wild all the same.