Note: This paper was among the papers adopted into the draft Library Fundamentals TS at the Issaquah WA USA ISO C++ meeting.

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Document number: N3921

Date: 2014-02-14

string_view: a non-owning reference to a string, revision 7

by Jeffrey Yasskin

Excerpt:

References to strings are very common in C++ programs, but often the callee doesn't care about the exact type of the object that owns the data...

Google, LLVM, and Bloomberg have independently implemented a string-reference type to encapsulate this kind of argument. ...

Acknowledgements

I'd like to thank Marshall Clow, Olaf van der Spek, the Boost and std-proposals mailing lists, Chandler Carruth, Beman Dawes, Alisdair Meredith, and especially Daniel Krügler for help, advice, and wording in this paper.