Re: [RFC 2/7] Add libiberty/concat styled concat_path function

Pedro Alves
2017-01-12T12:00:35Z

On 01/12/2017 11:32 AM, Philipp Rudo wrote:
> static inline int
> -startswith (const char *string, const char *pattern)
> +startswith (std::string str, std::string pattern)

NAK.

This is passing by copy, so will force unnecessary deep
string copies all over the place.

> {
> - return strncmp (string, pattern, strlen (pattern)) == 0;
> + return (str.find (pattern) == 0);
> +}
> +

I.e., before, this caused 0 copies:

startswith ("foo, "f");

After, you force a deep string copy for "foo", and another
for "f". It's as if you wrote:

startswith (xstrdup ("foo), xstrdup ("f"));

Also, this function is a static inline in a header so that
the compiler can see when "pattern" is a string literal, and
thus strlen can be optimized to a plain 'sizeof (pattern) - 1',
which is very frequent.

If you want to add overloads that can take "const std::string &"
for convenience, to avoid str.c_str(), that's maybe fine,
but you'd have to add all the combinations of
'const char *' x 'const std::string &' in the parameters, I
suppose.

Thanks,
Pedro Alves