(Original poster here.) Yes, returning indexes is also an excellent solution in this particular case, because it forces the programmer to keep the underlying s

(Original poster here.) Yes, returning indexes is also an excellent solution in this particular case, because it forces the programmer to keep the underlying string around. And you probably can save memory by using a pair<uint32,uint32>. Still, as several other people have pointed out, the truly idiomatic C++ solutions here are things like sub-ranges and string views. And these all use pointers internally. I deliberately chose to use an pair of pointers in place of these idiomatic types because it was easier to explain what was happening, not because I think C++ programmers should mess around with bare pointers. What I like about the Rust version is that I can work directly with low-level types in high-performance code, and the compiler still has my back.