Comparison of wxString to other string classes

The advantages of using a special string class instead of working directly with C strings are so obvious that there is a huge number of such classes available. The most important advantage is the need to always remember to allocate/free memory for C strings; working with fixed size buffers almost inevitably leads to buffer overflows. At last, C++ has a standard string class (std::string). So why the need for wxString?

There are several advantages:

1. Efficiency This class was made to be as efficient as possible: both in terms of size (each wxString objects takes exactly the same space as a char * pointer, sing reference counting) and speed. It also provides performance statistics gathering code which may be enabled to fine tune the memory allocation strategy for your particular application - and the gain might be quite big.
2. Compatibility This class tries to combine almost full compatibility with the old wxWidgets 1.xx wxString class, some reminiscence to MFC CString class and 90% of the functionality of std::string class.
3. Rich set of functions Some of the functions present in wxString are very useful but don't exist in most of other string classes: for example, AfterFirst, BeforeLast, operator<< or Printf. Of course, all the standard string operations are supported as well.
4. Unicode wxString is Unicode friendly: it allows to easily convert to and from ANSI and Unicode strings in any build mode (see the Unicode overview for more details) and maps to either string or wstring transparently depending on the current mode.
5. Used by wxWidgets And, of course, this class is used everywhere inside wxWidgets so there is no performance loss which would result from conversions of objects of any other string class (including std::string) to wxString internally by wxWidgets.

However, there are several problems as well. The most important one is probably that there are often several functions to do exactly the same thing: for example, to get the length of the string either one of length(), Len() or Length() may be used. The first function, as almost all the other functions in lowercase, is std::string compatible. The second one is "native" wxString version and the last one is wxWidgets 1.xx way. So the question is: which one is better to use? And the answer is that:

The usage of std::string compatible functions is strongly advised! It will both make your code more familiar to other C++ programmers (who are supposed to have knowledge of std::string but not of wxString), let you reuse the same code in both wxWidgets and other programs (by just typedefing wxString as std::string when used outside wxWidgets) and by staying compatible with future versions of wxWidgets which will probably start using std::string sooner or later too.

In the situations where there is no corresponding std::string function, please try to use the new wxString methods and not the old wxWidgets 1.xx variants which are deprecated and may disappear in future versions.