Thank you all for the continued feedback – especially Jan Schultke for the detailed comparisons, Thiago Macieira for raising the important security concerns, and Ville Voutilainen for the broader perspective!

I completely agree that solving this pain point (safe, efficient interop with C/WinAPI) is more important than whose design wins. I'd love to see std::cstring_view (or equivalent) in the standard as soon as possible, ideally for C++29 – regardless of whether it builds on my ideas or the current P3655R3. The demand is clearly there.

A few thoughts in response:

1. Progress: What has been the main blocker for P3655/cstring_view so far? From the revisions, it seems more about design consensus (naming, invariants, etc.) than implementation complexity – is that accurate?

2. On simplicity: My minimal c_str_view was motivated exactly because if we want a lightweight type, avoiding code duplication from string_view is key. One way to achieve this is making it a subtype inheriting from string_view (hiding/override data() if needed, adding c_str() for clearer semantics). Since a null-terminated view is always a valid string_view (but not vice versa), inheritance fits naturally – with no space overhead. Alternatively, keeping it independent with to_string_view() also avoids duplication. Either way seems fine to me.

3. On exceptions/checks: I still believe a one-size-fits-all noexcept/UB approach might not suit everyone. Some projects have zero tolerance for UB and prefer fail-fast (e.g., via exceptions or asserts in debug). Perhaps an optional macro (e.g., HAVE_C_STR_VIEW_EXCEPTION, default off) or contracts could accommodate this without forcing it on performance-critical code?

4. On Thiago Macieira's security concerns (embedded nulls): Great points – these are real risks in untrusted input scenarios. However, going back to string_view's original goals: it accelerates code by trusting input (avoiding repeated strlen) and consolidating (ptr, len) into one object.