How would this colocation of the string pointer work? Because these would be in the heap, right? Otherwise the pointer would get invalidated as soon as the enclosing function ends and its stack frame gets discarded. So if it is in the heap then you either have a pointer to the colocated pointer (not very useful, if negligible performance impact) or you're copying the colocated pointer (at which point you're back to square one, having a pointer in the stack and the underlying string in the heap). Am I missing something?