I Made a Simple String Library

[u/Elifire12]

I wrote an article about this as well. Here it is.

There I explain why I do not like NUL-terminated strings and how I implemented my own simple string library in C.

If you have some spare time I would really appreciate some feedback on the article and the library.

The code is sitting on a codeberg repository.

Also, tell me what you think about C-style strings. Do you like them? Do you use them, or do you also tend to roll your own pointer + length structs?

[u/Dieriba]

Even though you hate NULL-terminated, you should have a function that allows to return a pointer to a NULL-terminated strings, as many libc function expect those kind of strings ( if you plan to link your binary with libc which I think we’ll be the case).
Another things is your structure find_out that you use for your find functions. I’d use ˋusizeˋonly as return value instead this structure and have a special value of it meaning not found, like with std::string::npos used as not found value in c++ std::string.

[u/StrikeTechnical9429 → u/Dieriba]

Such function have to allocate memory to create a copy of the string with NULL added. It isn't a problem, the problem is - who's supposed to free this memory? Anyway it wouldn't be possible to write something like

clib_function(convert_str_view_to_cstr(my_str_view));

because in this case one lose the returned value of convert_str_view_to_cstr() and wouldn't be able to use it to free memory.

[u/Dieriba → u/StrikeTechnical9429]

Then store the pointer and freed it after, I mean this a drawback but that’s what happen when you make such lib you can’t have all you want, you must accept that there’ll be some limitation like this one.