Aga wrote: > I do not know if > you can (or if it is possible, how it can be done), extract with a way a > specific > a functionality from gnulib, with the absolute necessary code and only that.
gnulib-tool does this. With its --avoid option, the developer can even customize their notion of "absolutely necessary". > In a myriad of codebases a string type is implemented at least as: > size_t mem_size; > size_t num_bytes; > char *bytes; This is actually a string-buffer type. A string type does not need two size_t members. Long-term experience has shown that using different types for string and string-buffer is a win, because - a string can be put in a read-only virtual memory area, thus enforcing immutability (-> reducing multithread problems), - providing primitives for string allocation reduces the amount of buffer overflow bugs that otherwise occur in this area. [1] Unfortunately, the common string type in C is 'char *' with NUL termination, and a different type is hard to establish - because developers already know how to use 'char *', - because existing functions like printf consume 'char *' strings. - Few programs have had the need to correctly handles strings with embedded NULs. > An extended ustring (unicode|utf8) type can include information for its bytes > with > character semantics, like: > (utf8 typedef'ed as signed int) > utf8 code; // the integer representation > int len; // the number of the needed bytes > int width; // the number of the occupied cells > char buf[5]; // and probably the character representation Such a type would have a niche use, IMO, because - 99% of the processing would not need to access the width (screen columns) - so why spend CPU time and RAM to store it and keep it up-to-date? - 80% of the processing does not care about the Unicode code points either, and libraries like libunistring can do the Unicode-aware processing. > But the programmer mind would be probably best > if could concentrate to how to express the thought (with whatever meaning of > what we > are calling "thought") and follow this flow, or if could concentrate the > energy to > understand the intentions (while reading) of the code (instead of wasting > self with > the "details" of the code) and finally to the actual algorithm (usually > conditions > that can or can't be met). That is the idea behind the container types (list, map) in gnulib. However, I don't see how to reasonably transpose this principle to string types. Bruno [1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2019-09/msg00031.html