Re: [boost] [UTF String] Feedback on UTF String library, please

Subject: Re: [boost] [UTF String] Feedback on UTF String library, please
From: Brent Spillner (spillner_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-02-12 08:24:27

On 02/11/2011 14:09:27 Marsh Ray wrote:
>So let me ask the question:
>
>Just when is it really valid to want to jump the 278th "abstract
>character" in a string?
>
>Seriously, how often do these situations arise?

Well, Boyer-Moore string searching, obviously.  And as noted
previously, short snippets of null-terminated text are not the only
things that people store within a std:string or behind a char *.
There's a tremendous amount of data out there in fixed-column
databases, for example, and undoubtedly many  maintainers who'd like a
painless way to upgrade the column unit from 'byte' to 'generic
character.'  It's also probably a logical fallacy to assume that every
string algorithm on every device supported by Boost will always be
cache-limited.

If strings for you are just handles that you pass to other people's
APIs, then no, you don't need random access to the contents.  But if
you're seriously aiming to create a Unicode-aware drop-in replacement
for existing string classes, then it ought to support all of the
existing code that assumes efficient random access.  And if you can
provide measurable speedup for at least the common case, even at the
cost of a few extra bits per data chunk, that's worth pursuing.