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I should preface this question by saying I think the answer is probably no, but I'd like to see what other people think about the issue. I spend most of my time writing C++ that interacts with the Win32 API which like most C style APIs wants to either: Take buffers which I've provided and operate on them. Or return pointers to buffers which I need to later free. Both of these scenarios essentially mean that if you want to use std::string in your code you've got to accept the fact that you're going to be doing a lot of string copying every time you construct a std::string from a temporary buffer. What would be nice would be: To be able to allow C style APIs to safely directly mutate a std::string and pre-reserve its allocation and set its size in advance (to mitigate scenario 1) To be able to wrap a std::string around an existing char[] (to mitigate scenario 2) Is there a nice way to do either of these, or should I just accept that there's an inherent cost in using std::string with old school APIs? It looks like scenario 1 would be particularly tricky because std::string has a short string optimisation whereby its buffer could either be on the stack or the heap depending on its size.

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