Right, I've checked that char foo = "bar"; is indeed the same as the const char variant (both reference a string literal in rodata), which IMO makes it worse.

About string literals, the C23 standard states:

    It is unspecified whether these arrays are distinct provided their elements have the appropriate values. If the program attempts to modify such an array, the behavior is undefined.

I assumed you wanted a mutable array of char initializable from a string literal, which is provided by std::string and char[] (depending on usecase).

> In modern C++ you probably want to convert to a string_view asap (ideally using the sv literal suffix)

I know as much