First part of a discussion about designing a type storing character strings of length N (known at compile-time and sufficiently small).

Handling short codes - part I

by Andrzej Krzemieński

From the article:

In my work, we often deal with codes [...] The initial choice was to represent them in programs by type std::string, a general-purpose type for storing sequences of characters. But, as with any general-purpose tools, they fail to take into account the particular usage cases which often offer room for improvements [...] The following is an attempt at the design of a type that would take advantage of the information that we are only storing character strings of length N, where N is sufficiently small (say, no longer than 8)...