Comment by spankalee
3 days ago
Mutable string literals can't be easily deduplicated, unless your language semantics are that a literal is a singleton and all mutations are visible by all other evaluations of that literal. But no sane language would do that.
If the strings are backed by reference counted buffers, you can use copy-on-write semantics to provide the API of a mutable string but share buffers when a string is copied. Most C++ standard libraries actually did this prior to the multicore era.