We saw some time ago that the three major implementations of std::string are all quite different...

An informal comparison of the three major implementations of std::string

by Raymond Chen

From the article:

In the original version of this article, I got the sense of the “small/large” bit backward in the clang implementation. This in turn led to redoing the code generation and new code golfing results.

We’ll compare these versions based on the complexity of some commonly-used operations.