Note that the branch can be implemented in a way that compilers will lower into a CMOV, making the code size issue almost moot. I implemented that in fbstring back in the day:
https://github.com/facebook/folly/commit/be4c6d6b3e21914df8a...
This is the entirety of size():
0f b6 57 17 movzbl 0x17(%rdi),%edx
b8 17 00 00 00 mov $0x17,%eax
48 29 d0 sub %rdx,%rax
48 0f 48 47 08 cmovs 0x8(%rdi),%rax
> I'd personally think it would be interesting to test artificially increasing the sizeof() of strings from 24 bytes (the minimum needed to store a pointer, size and capacity) to something like 64 bytes, just to get longer strings using the SSO
And libstdc++ is actually 32 bytes :( It's easy to template on the inline capacity, you can look at llvm::SmallVector or folly::small_vector, but vocabulary types should have the smallest possible footprint. Vast majority of instances are either empty, or very small (think keys in a map).
The "optimal" implementation would actually have different allocation sizes when used mostly for processing and when used mostly for storage: for processing one would prefer bigger defaults, for storage, one needs as little as possible initial overhead.
That could be achieved by raising the knowledge of that distinction and introducing actually (at least) two kind of strings. And even more than that can be gained by recognizing that whenever the strings are involved in some more complex structures, some additional restrictions for totality of all associated strings could also be exploited: allocating the strings separately is an overhead by itself.
If I remember correctly, Turbo Pascal strings had the default size of 256 bytes and that's how much was on the stack for each, and that was fast even decades ago. That was not efficient for having a lot of them in the structures, if a lot of them could be smaller, but that was what a programmer had to care separately - still the typical processing of strings and working with the limited number of them was nicely covered by that default.
typedef unsigned char Str255[256];
typedef unsigned char Str63[64];
typedef unsigned char Str32[33];
typedef unsigned char Str31[32];
typedef unsigned char Str27[28];
typedef unsigned char Str15[16];
Str32 was used in AppleTalk (and probably a design error or bug; Str31 is a more ‘natural’ type)
It is probably just a small win and not everybody wanted to pay for the extra complexity (SSO is already fairly complex).
Re your suggestion on large SSO, years ago, when doing document clustering, using large fixed size strings (64 chars if I remember correctly, longer strings were just truncated) was a huge win for me (even coping them around wasn't an issue). Not sure if it is appropriate for a general purpose string though.
edit: never mind, I see what you mean about having to check the size.
[0]: https://github.com/facebook/folly/blob/master/folly/FBString...
Branches on their own aren't particularly expensive (especially not an easily predictable one like this), but they do screw with several compiler optimizations (auto-vectorization, for one). Given that, it seems like a reasonable decision, and the only way you'd know which one is faster is just testing it.
I'd personally think it would be interesting to test artificially increasing the sizeof() of strings from 24 bytes (the minimum needed to store a pointer, size and capacity) to something like 64 bytes, just to get longer strings using the SSO. The trade-off in the stack-space of the string seems like it would totally be worth it, and with 56 character long "small strings", a huge number of strings could fit in there (virtually all names, for instance). You probably couldn't do it for std::string (would wreck havoc with ABIs), but my hunch is that performance and memory usage might both benefit from the reduced memory allocations.