How to share global constants with minimum overhead at runtime?

Question

I am using C++11. I am not allowed to use external libraries like boost etc. I must use STL only.

I have a number of events, which must be identified as string const

Answer 1

You can have a struct of static strings:

struct MyNames
{
    static const std::string name1;
};

And in a cpp:

const std::string MyNames::name1 = "foo";

You can then access the names from all your required locations. In C++17, you would have used string_view instead to avoid object construction. But this seems to be a duplicate of this answer, basically: https://stackoverflow.com/a/55493109/2266772