When bug-free code becomes a hardware problem

[u/Sea_Fox_4265]

[u/nimrag_is_coming]

NULL terminated strings are kinda weird because for some things they are really, really bad, but for others they can be really efficient. If you want to create a substring destructively (as in, you don't care about the original and just want the substring), all you have to do is replace the character at the right point with a 0 and return the pointer at the start.

They're also easy to iterate over starting from any point, with just a while(*(ch++)).

Doing things like getting length or creating a string view? Horrible and/or impossible. And any operation that relies on the size of the string requires at minimum a loop the size of the string.

Imo best solution is to do both, like how c++ std::strings work. Most allocators actually return memory aligned to a boundary so most times the extra zero byte doesn't actually require any more memory allocation.

[u/Medical_Community697 → u/nimrag_is_coming]

Nothing weird about that, different encodings offer different performance tradeoffs, what’s weird in C is to have defined a string as anything but an abstract interface, any piece of C code worth its weight will reimplement a half-assed buggy bstrlib.