stricks VS libds

> I was thinking about Simple Dynamic Strings but I like this better.

Oh! here's my chance to plug https://github.com/alcover/stricks ! It follows the same principle as SDS (i.e user-facing type is char*) but is much faster (see bench) and frankly nicer to read through.

Not as feature complete, though.

Mine is also variable (see https://github.com/alcover/stricks/blob/main/src/stx.c). Maybe they switch more often that necessary ?

The threads were very interesting. I got back to work and it's time to talk speed ! https://github.com/alcover/stricks#speed

I may as well throw my hat into the ring: https://github.com/lelanthran/libds

I decided that I wanted to be able to simply drop a single .h file and a single .c file into any project without have to build a `libBlah.so` and link it to every project that needed (for example) a hashmap.

The practical result is that using the hashmap only requires me to copy the header and source files into the calling project.

It does build as a standalone library too, so you can link it if you want.

My primary reason for starting this is that I was pretty unsatisfied with all of the string libraries for C. When all I want to do is concatenate multiple strings together, I don't want to have to convert between `char ` and `struct stringtype ` everywhere.

The string functions are very useful as they all operate on the standard `char *` (nul-terminated) type.

That would be nice, then I wouldn't have to use non-standard stuff.

I made my own easy-to-incorporate-into-any-project library - https://github.com/lelanthran/libds - just copy the ds_*.h and ds_*.c into a project and you're good to go.

I'm not saying it will work for you, but it works for me.

> Is there a good string-manipulation C library?

You will have to define "good". My string library[1][2] is "good" for me because:

1. It's compatible with all the usual string functions (doesn't define a new type `string_t` or similar, uses existing `char `).

2. It does what I want: a) Works on multiple strings so repeated operations are easy, and b) Allocates as necessary so that the caller only has to free, and not calculate how much memory is needed beforehand.

The combination of the above means that many common* string operations that I want to do in my programs are both easy to do and easy to visually inspect for correctness in the caller.

Others will say that this is not good, because it still uses and exposes `char *`.

[1] https://github.com/lelanthran/libds/blob/master/src/ds_str.h

[2] Currently the only bug I know of is the quadratic runtime in many of the functions. I intend to fix this at some point.

As an example of an opaque pointer library, see https://github.com/lelanthran/libds/blob/v1.0.5/src/ds_ll.h - See line 7 for the typedef. - Lines 9, 10, 11 and 67, 68 and 69 for making it callable from C++.

I've done the same thing for my array library - use the first 4 bytes for the length, and everywhere else it behaves like a normal array (https://github.com/lelanthran/libds/blob/v1.0.5/src/ds_array.c)

So, I wrote a new library recently that works produces and consumes strings in the form that C already uses them in (making them more easily usable everywhere) - https://github.com/lelanthran/libds/blob/v1.0.5/src/ds_str.h