[perl #128226] Remove the requirement for null termination on PVs

On Tue Jun 21 08:44:13 2016, davem wrote:
> 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.

So it’s probably less useful than making the stack hold reference counts. :-)


-- 

Father Chrysostomos


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via perlbug:  queue: perl5 status: open
https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=128226

• [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