toStringz or not toStringz

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Tue, 12 Jul 2011 10:59:58 -0400, Steven Schveighoffer  
<schveiguy at yahoo.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 12 Jul 2011 10:50:07 -0400, Regan Heath <regan at netmail.co.nz>  
> wrote:
>
>> and in both cases, toStringz would do nothing as foo is zero terminated  
>> already (in both cases), or am I wrong about that?
>
> In neither case are they required to be null terminated.  The only thing  
> that guarantees null termination is a string literal.  Even "abc".dup is  
> not going to be guaranteed to be null terminated.  For an actual  
> example, try "012345678901234".dup.  This should have a 0x0f right after  
> the last character.

And, actually, the cost penalty of checking if you are going to segfault  
(i.e. checking if the ptr is into heap data, and then getting the length)  
is quite costly.  You must take the GC lock.

-Steve