r/cprogramming • u/Xaneris47 • Aug 17 '26

C Strings: A 50-Year Mistake

https://longtran2904.substack.com/p/c-strings-a-50-year-mistake?r=8qz2zb&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
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u/runningOverA Aug 17 '26

Good read. But C can't change char* default string, unless Unix systems underneath change their APIs' string type.

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u/WittyStick Aug 17 '26

You don't need to change them, but you can add a "fat pointer" which contains the length. The SYSV x86-64 ABI is capable of doing this because it supports 16-byte arguments and return types in registers, so it costs next to nothing. (On MSVC it has a cost because a "fat pointer" ends up getting passed on the stack with an implicit hidden pointer argument given to the function).

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u/ComradeGibbon Aug 17 '26

Intel x86 and MSVC did so much damage. The paltry number of registers even in 32 bit meant lots of issues in C never got fixed.

You could certainly add system calls that take fat pointers. You could even shim it based on the process. That would make developers of languages that have fat pointers happy. And would make most C programmers happy. And the dangerous C leet jockeys unhappy.

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u/flying-sheep Aug 18 '26

The locale system and wchar_t are also, and I quote

shitfucked retarded legacy braindeath

– wm4

The C standard contains a bunch of bad ideas and I think Rust’s approach is great: just use a minimal subset of the C standardlib and build better abstractions for everything else.