GNU pissed me off in the latest long-awaited ABI break by making std::string a whopping 32 bytes on 64bit platforms, yet only supporting 16 bytes inline for SSO

GNU pissed me off in the latest long-awaited ABI break by making std::string a whopping 32 bytes on 64bit platforms, yet only supporting 16 bytes inline for SSO. Their argument is it takes no more memory because std::string always allocated at least that much anyway, but it bloats structs and classes unnecessarily, and every single other vendor does it better. I don't think you can blame the C++ standards committee for vendors creating shitty implementations. At the moment, unless you're exposing an object via a public API, I recommend using boost::string and boost::multi_index for hash tables. In public APIs expose a good old fashioned char*,size_t pair, or copy to a std::string.