Re: creating unibyte strings

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>> Which reminds me: could someone add to the module API a primitive to
>> build a *unibyte* string?
> I don't like adding such a primitive.  We don't want to proliferate
> unibyte strings in Emacs through that back door, because manipulating
> unibyte strings involves subtle issues many Lisp programmers are not
> aware of.

I don't see what's subtle about "unibyte" strings, as long as you
understand that these are strings of *bytes* instead of strings
of *characters* (i.e. they're `int8[]` rather than `w_char_t[]`).

"Multibyte" strings are just as subtle (maybe more so even), yet we
rightly don't hesitate to offer a primitive way to construct them.

> Instead, how about doing that via vectors of byte values?

What's the advantage?  That seems even more convoluted: create a Lisp
vector of the right size (i.e. 8x the size of your string on a 64bit
system), loop over your string turning each byte into a Lisp integer
(with the reverted API, this involves allocation of an `emacs_value`
box), then pass that to `concat`?

It's probably going to be even less efficient than going through utf-8
and back.

Think about cases where the module receives byte strings from the disk
or the network and need to pass that to `decode-coding-string`.
And consider that we might be talking about megabytes of strings.


        Stefan