Issue #19315 has been updated by kou (Kouhei Sutou). I think that we should not deprecate `RSTRING_PTR()` for backward compatibility. How about adding a new API such as `RSTRING_RAW_PTR()` for `char *` that may not be `\0`-terminated instead? `RSTRING_RAW_PTR()` works like the current `RSTRING_PTR()` (no `\0`-terminated check). New `RSTRING_PTR()` ensures `\0`-terminated `char *` automatically like `str_fill_term()` does. If many C extension codes migrate to `RSTRING_RAW_PTR()` from `RSTRING_PTR()`, we can avoid data copy. ---------------------------------------- Feature #19315: Lazy substrings in CRuby https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/19315#change-117249 * Author: Eregon (Benoit Daloze) * Status: Open ---------------------------------------- CRuby should implement lazy substrings, i.e., "abcdef"[1..3] must not copy bytes. Currently CRuby only reuse the char* if the substring is until the end of the buffer. But it should also work wherever the substring starts and ends. Yes, it means RSTRING_PTR() might need to allocate to \0-terminate, so be it, it's worth it. There is already code for this (`SHARABLE_MIDDLE_SUBSTRING`), but it's disabled by default and `RSTRING_PTR()` needs to be changed to deal with this. It seems a good idea to introduce a variant of `RSTRING_PTR` which doesn't guarantee \0-termination, so such callers can then use the existing bytes always without copy. There are countless workarounds for this missing optimization, all not worth it with lazy substring and all less readable: * https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/19314 * https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/18598#note-3 * https://github.com/ruby/net-protocol/pull/14 * Manual lazy substrings which track string + index + length * More but I don't remember all now, feel free to comment or link more urls/tickets. -- https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/