I already considered using a template with single character constants, and I thought the technic didn't have much benefit over the macro version.
Maybe compile-time routing function genetation could be possible with it (and would faster), but requres HUGE work I think. I will try and benchmark it later.
I'd hope that in the end, the efficiency of the routing matters more than templates vs macros. You will never finish anything if you pay too much attention to all the purists.
Useful strings at compile time is a desirable feature beyond c++, though. A perfect hash could be a nice solution, I thought, but I got around to trying out gperf, and it was much slower than I expected. Probably too slow to use in ordinary situations. I guess gperf is for when (runtime) performance is incredibly important.
Another possible approach to strings at compile time is something like flex, or re2c. I haven't tested them in this type of scenario. But, apparently Zed Shaw used ragel to parse http in Mongrel to excellent effect. My problem with ragel is its complicated syntax.
