Porting Go's strings package to C

Creating a subset of Go that translates to C was never my end goal. I liked writing C code with Go, but without the standard library it felt pretty limited. So, the next logical step was to port Go's stdlib to C. Of course, this isn't something I could do all at once. I started with the io package, which provides core abstractions like Reader and Writer, as well as general-purpose functions like Copy. But io isn't very interesting on its own, since it doesn't include specific reader or writer implementations. So my next choices were naturally bytes and strings — the workhorses of almost every Go program. This post is about how the porting process went. Bits and UTF-8 • Bytes • Allocators • Buffers and builders • Benchmarks • Optimizing search • Optimizing builder • Wrapping up Bits and UTF-8 Before I could start porting bytes, I had to deal with its dependencies first: math/bits implements bit counting and manipulation functions. unicode/utf8 implements functions for UTF-8 encoded…