Why is there no support for concatenating std::string and std::string_view?

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The reason for this is given in n3512 string_ref: a non-owning reference to a string, revision 2 by Jeffrey Yasskin:

I also omitted operator+(basic_string, basic_string_ref) because LLVM returns a lightweight object from this overload and only performs the concatenation lazily. If we define this overload, we'll have a hard time introducing that lightweight concatenation later.

It has been later suggested on the std-proposals mailing list to add these operator overloads to the standard.

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s3rvac

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Updated on June 08, 2022

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  • s3rvac
    s3rvac almost 2 years

    Since C++17, we have std::string_view, a light-weight view into a contiguous sequence of characters that avoids unnecessary copying of data. Instead of having a const std::string& parameter, it is now often recommended to use std::string_view.

    However, one quickly finds out that switching from const std::string& to std::string_view breaks code that uses string concatenation as there is no support for concatenating std::string and std::string_view:

    std::string{"abc"} + std::string_view{"def"}; // ill-formed (fails to compile)
    std::string_view{"abc"} + std::string{"def"}; // ill-formed (fails to compile)
    

    Why is there no support for concatenating std::string and std::string_view in the standard?