In interop scenarios, it might be useful to be able to have a Python string referencing an existing buffer without copies (e.g. if the underlying char data is stored in NumPy/PyTorch tensors, accessing these char buffers with a standard Python interface is helpful for debugging and sometimes for perf).

I think it currently might be possible with ctypes and making use of existing PyUnicode/PyASCIIobject object layout and resetting the size/data fields to my own values.

I agree that usefulness over copying the byte buffer is not very prominent, but still might be useful in some specific scenarios: e.g. by mmap'ing a giant string from a disk file and being able to examine it in an easy way