On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 9:51 PM, Stewart, Robert <Robert.Stewart@sig.com> wrote:
Dean Michael Berris wrote:
On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 7:50 PM, Artyom <artyomtnk@yahoo.com> wrote:
From: Dave Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com>
Who says we need a c_str()?
Almost everybody who uses any kind of API that does not has direct uses of this string and this is as almost every API around...
Right, but what's keeping that person from creating an std::string from this hypothetical `boost::string` if they really need a c_str()?
Do you mean besides poorer performance and greater complexity of use?
Sure, but a conversion operator implemented by the hypothetical boost::string should suffice no? For interfaces that take an std::string, that'd be all you need really. For those that need a c_str(), then I guess it's the price you pay for a crazy efficient string that you can use in the innards of your application and just pay for the cost of when you just need a c_str(). :D Of course I'm half-joking there, but I think that's a reasonable price to pay I think much like how everyone is just dealing with the fact that you absolutely have to at some point just linearize your data structures into a void* for it to be sent through network APIs that take a void* and a size. Maybe people want to have zero-copy APIs but even Linux doesn't provide that API just yet at least to the user-space applications so I don't see why having just an extra string copy to an std::string would be a big deal. -- Dean Michael Berris about.me/deanberris