Exactly, thinking about things in terms of their implementations is usually not a good way to actually understand what that thing is. By arguing that std::strin

Exactly, thinking about things in terms of their implementations is usually not a good way to actually understand what that thing is. By arguing that std::string is just the struct itself, which consists of who knows what... you fail to appreciate the actual semantics of std::string and how those semantics are really what defines the std::string. std::string_view also has implementation details that in principle could be similar to std::string, it's a pointer with a size, but the semantics of std::string_view are very different from the semantics of std::string. And that's the crux of the issue, it's better to understand classes in terms of their semantics, how they operate, rather than their implementations. Implementations can change, and two very separate things can have the same or very similar implementations. A std::string is not just some pointers and some record keeping data; a std::string is best understood as a class used to own and manage a sequence of characters with the various operations that one would expect for such management. A std::string_view is non-owning, read-only variation of such a class that operates on an existing sequence of characters. How these are implemented and their structural details is not really what's important, it's how someone is expected to use them and what can be done with them that counts.