It doesn't really make sense within the context of complexity analysis as something distinct from constant-time, which is denoted with O(1). A copy of a CoW string is O(1).
This. Pretty much with complexity analysis, you factor out any constants and only look at the term of complexity with the highest growth rate, so you end up with 1 < ln n < n < nª < 2^n (this can be extended indefinitely by replacing the n in the last case with anything to the right of n, but in practice, these are the only ones that matter.
Stuff that happens at compile-time is O(0) (well, technically it's amortized over the number of times you run the compiled code, eh? Huh, how does JIT compilation affect Big-O analysis?)
