I think a vec is important for the same reason a string is… because being able to properly get the length, and standardized ways to push/pop from them that don’t require manual bounds checking and calls to realloc.
replyHash maps are mostly only important because everyone ought to standardize on a way of hashing keys.
But I suppose they can both be “bring your own”… to me it’s more that these types are so fundamental and so “table stakes” that having one base implementation of them guaranteed by the language’s standard lib is important.
why not std::string?
replyYou can surely create a std::string-like type in C, call it "newstring", and write functions that accept and return newstrings, and re-implement the whole standard library to work with newstrings, from printf() onwards. But you'll never have the comfort of newstring literals. The nice syntax with quotes is tied to zero-terminated strings. Of course you can litter your code with preprocessor macros, but it's inelegant and brittle.
replyHacker News seems not to hate antirez's sds
replyIt's a class, so it doesn't work in C.
replySure, but you can have a similar string abstraction in C. What would you miss? The overloaded operators?
replyAutomatic memory accounting — construct/copy/destruct. You can't abstract these in C. You always have to call i_copied_the_string(&string) after copying the string and you always have to call the_string_is_out_of_scope_now(&string) when it goes out of scope
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