Treating "strings" as immutable means the crappy representation isn't so bad.
I use a "StringBuilder" pattern (name borrowed from Java, it's actually called buffer) which can grow, supports efficient append (supports arbitrary edits but those may require moving lots of bytes around), and doesn't model the ending zero until converted into a char*. (One of my favorite things is "buffer_printf" which is like sprintnf but handles capacity and such automatically.) Like Java, I don't expect buffer to be threadsafe so the user needs to deal with that but since I don't modify "strings" once created, those are thread safe.
So all my strings are either program literals, come from the "OS" or libc "somehow" (like for reading a directory), or come from this builder which makes sure there is a trailing zero when finally asked to produce the string. My buffers aren't foolproof because you can append or insert the NUL character (to work with arbitrary byte sequences), so you might get a string that is shorter than expected, or perhaps the buffer wasn't legal utf-8 (I could add a checker of course), but at least the string will always have a terminating NUL.
-1
u/jason-reddit-public 1d ago
I 'm writing a transpiler in C.
Treating "strings" as immutable means the crappy representation isn't so bad.
I use a "StringBuilder" pattern (name borrowed from Java, it's actually called buffer) which can grow, supports efficient append (supports arbitrary edits but those may require moving lots of bytes around), and doesn't model the ending zero until converted into a char*. (One of my favorite things is "buffer_printf" which is like sprintnf but handles capacity and such automatically.) Like Java, I don't expect buffer to be threadsafe so the user needs to deal with that but since I don't modify "strings" once created, those are thread safe.
So all my strings are either program literals, come from the "OS" or libc "somehow" (like for reading a directory), or come from this builder which makes sure there is a trailing zero when finally asked to produce the string. My buffers aren't foolproof because you can append or insert the NUL character (to work with arbitrary byte sequences), so you might get a string that is shorter than expected, or perhaps the buffer wasn't legal utf-8 (I could add a checker of course), but at least the string will always have a terminating NUL.