Thank you for making me look at the implementation of std::string in GCC's libstdc++... The "small string optimization" indeed makes every std::string at least

Thank you for making me look at the implementation of std::string in GCC's libstdc++... The "small string optimization" indeed makes every std::string at least 1 size_t + 1 pointer + 16 bytes large (for a total of 32 bytes on 64-bits platforms). Strings smaller than 16 bytes are stored in the 16 bytes inline buffer, which means strings larger than that actually take 32 + their length + 1 bytes in memory on 64-bits platforms. I guess things are not packed further to allow to just directly use the pointer instead of having to do some computation for each access.