Re: Performance issue with COW strings?

[Benjamin Kosnik <bkoz at redhat dot com>]

> Excellent! We badly need this kind of hard data. Well, I could prepare a
> simple patch just disabling refererence-counting, would be simple.
> However, since you don't care about compatibility, I would ask you to
> wait just a couple of weeks: after some overdue branch maintainance, I
> will add to v7-branch a simple alternate base class for basic_string,
> avoiding ref-counting, selectable at configure time. Carrying out
> comparisons will be very easy and meaningful, because the full set of
> "utility" functions will remain the same, only the low-level bits will
> be different in the two configurations.

Paolo, I think you need to reconsider adding the policy-based string
class to mainline as an extension class. I know we've discussed this
before, but I still think this is a smart move. 

Any chance you can reconsider your position?

-benjamin