In situations when there might be a lot of _empty_ strings, the 'capacity' and 'size' can be taken out of the fixed part and bundled with the data instead. Thi

In situations when there might be a lot of _empty_ strings, the 'capacity' and 'size' can be taken out of the fixed part and bundled with the data instead. This will bring sizeof(string) to a size of a single pointer and will still allow for short strings of 7 chars (in 64-bit builds). Memory allocations are usually aligned by default, so the pointers will have at least one lower bit cleared and available to be used as a mode flag. If in doubt, allocating through aligned_alloc(2,...) will guarantee an unused bit in a pointer.