> I'm was quite surprised you didnt offer your own stringview implementation (or something similar) the last time I looked at protobuf. We sort of do actually:

> I'm was quite surprised you didnt offer your own stringview implementation (or something similar) the last time I looked at protobuf. We sort of do actually: https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/blob/master/src/google/protobuf/stubs/stringpiece.h https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/blob/master/src/... The internal version of protobuf lets you switch individual string fields to string_view using [ctype=STRING_PIECE], but migrating the default away from std::string is mainly just an enormous migration challenge. Internally we also do something slightly nuts: we break the encapsulation of std::string so that we can point it to arena-allocated memory (we then "steal" the memory back before the destructor runs). We can only afford to do this internally, where the implementation of std::string is known. The real long-term solution is to move to string_view.