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Comment by mhogomchungu | Hacker News Reader

> char response[] = "HTTP/1.1 200 OK\nContent-Type: text/html\n\nlol";

isnt it better to write that as:

const char* response = "HTTP/1.1 200 OK\nContent-Type: text/html\n\nlol"; ?

Having the string in a writable buffer when you have no intention of modifying the string seems like not a very good idea.

Any decent compiler will evaluate "strlen(response)" at compile time and hence there will be no run time penalty here.

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> Having the string in a writable buffer when you have no intention of modifying the string seems like not a very good idea.

Any decent compiler will also notice this and put the string literal in the .RODATA section. Using "const" doesn't really make a difference, it's more of a hint for the compiler.

It really doesn't make any difference in this case.

It may be a hint to modern compilers, but it's also the documentation of intent for future developers[1].

[1] Where future developers includes me - I'll forget what I wrote in six months or less.

Not just as documentation, it would prevent another developer from accidentally modifying it.

Excellent point ... I kind of assumed that (your IDE giving you a warning that you're trying to modify a constant) when I was thinking about it as documentation but your point more succinctly describes "making it hard to make mistakes".

It does, the compiler doesn't know what the function "send" will do. The const isn't the focus of what he said, it's allocating in the stack vs in a read-only memory location.

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