Can't see how this would affect string concatenation negatively compared to plain char? The problem with java string is that it's pre-allocated to the exact len

Can't see how this would affect string concatenation negatively compared to plain char? The problem with java string is that it's pre-allocated to the exact length, normally char-strings are also that. They don't magically make things faster just because they are missing a length-field, quite the contrary actually because now you need to iterate it twice to concatenate two strings without a StringBuffer equivalent, once to figure out the length of the result so you can allocate the correct size and once to do the actual copy. Don't see why you shouldn't be able to make a fat pointer point into a range inside the original array either? Just point it to an element and make the length-field shorter than the original? This is usally called array_view, span or slice in other languages.