This morning I listened to a podcast interview with Kate Gregory. She used some terms I hadn’t heard in years: BSTR, OLE strings, etc.
Around a decade ago I was working with COM in C++ and had to deal with the menagerie of string types Kate Gregory mentioned. I wrote an article to get all the various types straight in my head: all the different memory allocation rules, conventions for use, conversions between types, etc. I never published the article. When I started my personal website I thought about posting the article there, but then I thought that by now nobody cared about such things. But the interview I listened to this morning made me think more people might be interested than I’d thought. So I posted my article Unravelling Strings in Visual C++ in case someone finds it useful.