Hacker News Reader

D uses "phat pointers" for strings, aka a length/pointer pair. Over the years, this has proven to be simple, efficient, and resistant to errors. It means array bounds checking can be automatically done. It enables efficient slicing.

String literals also have an extra 0 appended, making it transparently easy to still pass strings to C functions like printf.

>"phat pointers"

I don't know if that is a typo given you normally call them "fat pointers", but they are "pretty hot and tempting".

C++ has string support in the standard library.

It doesn't have the same breadth of features as, say, Python's string class, but it's ok.

See, eg. https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/string

In my opinion, still a bit hairy, the reason something like nowide exists [1].

1: https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/develop/libs/nowide/doc/html/...

How is the support of unicode in c++?

C++ itself doesn't support it. There are libraries that provide unicode-aware handling of strings/vectors of bytes. It's not always clear that you want unicode-aware code when dealing with unicode, but there are times when it is nice to have.

It's exceedingly verbose, but decent, if you have a recent language version and/or Boost.