My play with C++17's string_ref proposal, with own extensions like edit_distance (Levenshtein distance). Taken from a larger project of mine.
Test (with GoogleTest, already supplied)
cd unit-tests
make
./string-ref-test
Linux required.
Note that the makefile's content is excerpted from Make's echoing while executing the makefile in the original larger project's /unit-tests. You should modify it if necessary.