How to manage string slices with less overhead?

Question

I'm dealing with giant (up to 2GB) strings and their slices in C++ program. C-style strings seem to be unreliable under such circumstances, but can be sliced trivially (without '\0' at the end). On the other hand, as I understood, std::string::substr copies the slice, therefore I should perform at least one extra addition operation (index + base) per indexing in order to keep memory usage rational.

Answer 1

The most general solution would be to create a slice object, with the interface you need, and use that. The slice object could consist of two iterators, the start and the end.