On Fri, 17 Apr 2026 at 15:33, Jason McKesson via Std-Proposals <
std-proposals_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 17, 2026 at 9:59 AM Muneem via Std-Proposals
> <std-proposals_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> >
> > Basically, there should be a standard version that balanced it, just
> like there is for strings that sometimes provides small string
> optimization, and if the user finds such standard balance unsatisfactory
> then he can build his own.
>
> Your argument is historically false. To the extent that `std::string`
> was designed to allow for optimizations, some of those optimizations
> didn't work out. Copy-on-write implementations were something that
> C++98 explicitly wanted to allow for, but as time progressed, it
> became clear that these were bad ideas.
>
> And undoing those ideas took a *long time*. C++11 had to forbid CoW,
> and even then, libstdc++ took forever to break ABI to stop using CoW.
>

2015