Re: [boost] Heads up - string_ref landing

Subject: Re: [boost] Heads up - string_ref landing
From: Andrey Semashev (andrey.semashev_at_[hidden])
Date: 2012-11-19 08:07:37

On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 4:49 PM, Olaf van der Spek <ml_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 4:42 AM, Yanchenko Maxim
> <maximyanchenko_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>> Mathias, it's not just compile-time size (which is good to have as well, btw).
>> What about literals with a zero character inside, like "foo\0bar"?
>
> What about them?
> Such literals aren't proper null-terminated strings, are they?
>
>> I believe string_ref should be able to handle the case, in order to be useful.
>
> For such literals the (const char*, size_t) constructor should be used.

This is simply not practical:

// code duplication
string_ref lit("Hello, World!", sizeof("Hello, World!"));
wstring_ref lit(L"Hello, World!", sizeof(L"Hello, World!") / sizeof(wchar_t));
// error prone
string_ref lit("Hello, World!", 13);

Although I don't aim to address the \0 in the middle of the string
literal, I'd like such construction to be cleaner and preferably
without strlen/wcslen:

string_ref lit = string_ref::from_literal("Hello, World!");

or

string_ref lit = make_literal_ref("Hello, World!");

or whatever. Not every compiler is able to optimize away strlen/wcslen
on a literal, this generator is intended to remove its need
altogether.

PS: I don't really understand why we are arguing about this little
helper anyway. There are people who will find it useful, others can
safely ignore it.