fixedstring: a @safe, @nogc string type

[Paul Backus]

On Wednesday, 12 January 2022 at 19:55:41 UTC, Moth wrote:
>> [snip]
>> Another issue is the way concatenation is implemented. Since 
>> FixedStrings have compile-time size, this potentially means 
>> every time you concatenate a string in your code you get 
>> another instantiation of FixedString. This can lead to a LOT 
>> of template bloat if you're not careful, which may quickly 
>> outweigh any benefits you may have gained from not using the 
>> built-in strings.
>
> oh dear, that doesn't sound good. i hadn't considered that at 
> all. i'm not sure how to even begin going about fixing that...

One thing you could potentially do is to round the size of the 
result up to, say, a power of two. That way, instead of 
instantiating a new template for every individual string length, 
you only instantiate `FixedString!16`, `FixedString!32`, 
`FixedString!64`, etc.

Of course, doing this will leave you with some wasted memory at 
runtime. So you will probably want to run some benchmarks to 
compare performance before and after.