Why do you prefer char* instead of string, in C++?

Question

I\'m a C programmer trying to write c++ code. I heard string in C++ was better than char* in terms of security, performance, etc, however sometimes it

Answer 1

In general, std::string is a cleaner, safer way to go because it removes the burden of memory management from the programmer. The main reason it can be faster than char *'s, is that std::string stores the length of the string. So, you don't have to do the work of iterating through the entire character array looking for the terminating NULL character each time you want to do a copy, append, etc.

That being said, you will still find a lot of c++ programs that use a mix of std::string and char *, or have even written their own string classes from scratch. In older compilers, std::string was a memory hog and not necessarily as fast as it could be. This has gotten better over time, but some high-performance applications (e.g., games and servers) can still benefit from hand-tuned string manipulations and memory-management.

I would recommend starting out with std::string, or possibly creating a wrapper for it with more utility functions (e.g., starts_with(), split(), format(), etc.). If you find when benchmarking your code that string manipulation is a bottleneck, or uses too much memory, you can then decide if you want to accept the extra risks and testing that a custom string library demands.

TIP: One way of getting around the memory issues and still use std::string is to use an embedded database such as SQLite. This is particularly useful when generating and manipulating extremely large lists of strings, and performance is better than what you might expect.