well, too slow ? hm, maybe we should have the option of fixed sized strings, but strlen(szWhatever) shouldnt be faster than string.length() I guess. Dynamic allocation for appending something to the string might be using some time, but this operations are not used that often, and could be avoided by telling how many elements we wanna allocate in the constructor ...
about that unicode stuff : just replace all chars with some typedef type, so that the class can easily be recompiled for unicode without having to search the whole code
but I know PMB, you believe that C++ is always slower, I know, so I guess I should stop here
