Just a few days ago there was a lot of discussion here about std::string performance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8704318 https://news.ycombinator.co

Just a few days ago there was a lot of discussion here about std::string performance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8704318 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8704318 I think refcounted strings are falling out of favor. In a multithreaded environment you need to use atomic ops to maintain the reference count which gets expensive. (folly's fbstring class does use them for large strings though)