Questions:
1. Why not enable mutations to the substring?
2. Can we generalize this to a slice for any container? Is the intention
behind this design to generalize to other containers, such as seq?
As for strings having to end at '0' not enable slicing with O(1). I would argue
that conversion to/from a C string is less common of an operation than slicing,
i.e. just copy to a new string if you need convert to a C string.
On the ABI design: where is the capacity stored (is there a capacity?). An
alternative design is to use a single pointer (`char*`) to declare the string.
You can then over-allocate memory for additional fields w.r.t metadata. The
pointer you return will have to be offset to start at the start of the buffer
string.
In stb headers they use this trick for stb_array, i.e. you can do the following
float* myarr = NULL;
stb_arr_push(my_array, 0.0f);
stb_arr_push(my_array, 1.0f);
stb_arr_push(my_array, 2.0f);
for (int i = 0; i < stb_arr_len(my_array); ++i) {
printf("%f\n", my_array[i]); // NOTE: you can index like a regular
array in C
}
Run
For this case, you would store `(len, capacity, is_slice)` (is_slice in len if
preferred). Of course, since this is at the language level, this is probably
not necessary since we have operator overloading.
One other consideration: if generalizing to slices, you could store the stride
as well - I imagine this would be a handy feature.
