Re: [perl #128226] Remove the requirement for null termination onPVs

On Mon, May 23, 2016 at 04:51:29PM -0700, Father Chrysostomos wrote:
> If we could remove the requirement that PVs in SVs have a terminating
> null, we could make things like substr() faster (by having it use the
> same string buffer as the full original string).
> 
> Since it is not uncommon in XS code to pass SvPV(...) to a system
> function that expects null termination, we would probably have to make
> SvPV allocate a new string with the null, and introduce a new version of
> SvPV (SvPV_nn_ok(sv,len)?) that may return unterminated strings and
> assumes the caller will depend solely on the len value.
> 
> Of course, any code that passes SvPVX to a C function will probably
> break.  I don’t know whether there is any way to avoid that.  A survey
> of SvPVX uses on CPAN would be time-consuming, but helpful.

SvPV* are used 1000+ times in the main *.c perl core. All those uses would
have to be reviewed to see whether the inefficient copying version needs
retaining.

According to http://grep.cpan.me, excluding ppport.h etc, 163
distributions use SvPV_* and 224 distributions use SvPVX*

That's a lot of breakage, inefficiency, or fixups.

-- 
The optimist believes that he lives in the best of all possible worlds.
As does the pessimist.

• [perl #128226] Remove the requirement for null termination on PVs by Father Chrysostomos
• Re: [perl #128226] Remove the requirement for null termination onPVs by Dave Mitchell
• [perl #128226] Remove the requirement for null termination on PVs by Father Chrysostomos via RT