The string stuff in abseil is mostly a historical byproduct of what google was doing in 1998: manipulating lots of strings. at the time, the C++ standard libra

The string stuff in abseil is mostly a historical byproduct of what google was doing in 1998: manipulating lots of strings. at the time, the C++ standard library string implementation (mainly the GNU one) was immature and slow. The string library was written in the early days for performance reasons, as well as reliability (at the time, the libstdc++ was so bad that most string operations just made garbage, not strings). And then it got too expensive to change the entire codebase. I remember Sanjay Ghemawat or Jeff Dean mentioning that one of their big "optimizations" was to inline short strings into the string object- instead of a string that was "size_t len, size_t capacity, char *data", anything less than 24 bytes was just stored directly instead of with a pointer. when you're running mapreduces with trillions of small keys, this makes a big difference!