I'm not aware of any common string implementation that takes 3-4 words just to put an empty string in your struct especially if it also still requires external allocation with additional size words once the string gets above a certain size. Java takes 1, Go takes 2, SDS takes 1, libstdc++ takes 3 but doesn't require an external store later, etc.

from https://github.com/elliotgoodrich/SSO-23/blob/master/README....

  MSVC  32
  GCC  32
  Clang 24

SDS is not typesafe, no SSO, no slices.

Your library is very nice.