I encourage people to use sds if that's the best option. However, I don't think that's the best option if you can roll your own. I personally think that there

I encourage people to use sds if that's the best option. However, I don't think that's the best option if you can roll your own. I personally think that there should be two different types of strings: static and dynamic ones. The static ones should not be able to be changed, but the dynamic ones can serve as a "string builder" type of sorts. Second, I don't see sds's first advantage (in the README) to be an advantage. Sure, you may have to explicitly pass the buffer in to C functions, but that tells you that you're calling a function that takes a char array rather than your string. It makes it more explicit. Second, if you use my method of splitting static strings from dynamic strings, then sds's second advantage doesn't apply because the pointer will never change. But the disadvantages of sds still apply, and both disadvantages are big since they easily lead to bugs. Hence, I think sds is not the best option if you can make your own. Oh, another advantage of the static/dynamic split: I can implement small string semantics. For small enough strings, I use a union to put the array into the same bytes as the pointer, so on 64-bit machines, I can have 8-byte strings (including nul) before needing an actual allocation.