On Tuesday, 22 December 2020 21:33:35 -03 Tom Mason via Std-Proposals wrote:
> The problem is that there is no way to know if a given string_view is null
> terminated. My proposal is to add a method bool null_terminated() to
> string_view. When a string_view is constructed, the caller can tell the
> implementation that the pointer it is providing is null terminated. The
> conversion from std::string to std::string_view would set this flag.

This is an ABI-changing proposal. Please provide strong enough motivation to
warrant it.

Given the cost, it might be worth to have a separate class to indicate zero-
terminated string views.

> At the point where you need a null-terminated string, you can check the
> null_terminated() member before proceeding, and handle it accordingly. I
> have a proof of concept implementation here:
> https://gist.github.com/wheybags/3c06795d251f004e007d47b3a5d823a7. This PoC
> stores the "null terminated" flag in the highest bit of the length field,
> so the memory footprint is unchanged. On a 64 bit machine this is no loss
> really, as storing exabytes of data in one std::string is not reasonable.
> On machines with small word sizes the null_terminated() member just returns
> false. Of course, you could also just use a separate flag boolean.

Reasonableness is not the point, it's disallowed by the standard actually on
those machines. The maximum size of any contiguous object on modern
architectures is PTRDIFF_MAX-1, which is less than half SIZE_MAX. So, for
those, there's one bit free in the size field, even on 32-bit platforms. But
this consideration is not valid for the standard, which can't make that same
assumption.

> I hope this is not a duplicate posting, and that this writeup is acceptable.
> I did try searching both here and the old google groups list, and I didn't
> find anything that looked like this. Please let me know what you think.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago (AT) macieira.info - thiago (AT) kde.org
   Software Architect - Intel DPG Cloud Engineering