On Thu, Oct 23, 2025, 11:41 PM Vinnie Falco via Boost <boost@lists.boost.org> wrote:
On Thu, Oct 23, 2025 at 4:17 AM Dmitry Arkhipov via Boost < boost@lists.boost.org> wrote:
Url's and Charconv's maintainers decided to not play along with the charade and reference boost::core::string_view directly with the obvious drawback that that type is not documented anywhere.
core::detail::string_view was added because this pull request FROM 2018 (seven years ago) was rejected: https://github.com/boostorg/utility/pull/51
We really need to fix this properly. In my opinion the maintainer of utility::string_view made the wrong choice when they rejected the pull request to make the constructors more useful.
[snip] I second this. Last year I was in the process of writing an issue to ask for this feature in boost::basic_string_view, when I discovered that it had already been discussed years earlier. From a user perspective, I work on a code base that was previously C++ <17, and is now C++ >=17. New code is written using std::string_view, but that doesn't negate the years of utilities and interfaces all throughout the code that use boost::string_view. At the end of the day, I just want to pass a std::string_view to an interface that expects a boost::string_view. I'm sure this is a common use case for people as their code moves to newer standards. I could either (1) convert my std::string_view to boost::string_view manually with data and size, (2) add a new overload to the utilities with proper constraints such that it's not ambiguous between the two overloads, or (3) replace the usage of boost::string_view with std::string_view outright. None of these are as simple as just passing a std::string_view to the interface, with no extra boilerplate or rejigging of the utility itself. C++17 is long since here, and std::string_view is a standard vocabulary type as much as std::string is. I think we're doing users a disservice by making them jump through hoops to convert between boost::string_view and std::string_view. This is a problem I've personally encountered, and I would be shocked if it isn't common. I'd love if we could reconsider, and give boost::string_view constructibility from (and convertibility to) std::string_view. Even better if that could be in time for 1.90. Thanks, Braden