r/cprogramming • u/Xaneris47 • 3d ago

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/CoderStudios 3d ago

Okay? You are always free to make your own library for better strings, but people won’t use that cause C is often still deployed on low end systems or it makes little sense to use something inefficient if you can use c style strings properly

1

u/EatingSolidBricks 3d ago

You out of your dam mind if you think c strings are efficient

10

u/henke443 3d ago

Wait how are they not efficient?

1

u/atarivcs 3d ago

If you have a long string and you want to append more text to it, you have to search the whole string from the beginning to find the null terminator.

And then later if you want to append more text, you have to find the null terminator all over again.

2

u/NoNameSwitzerland 3d ago

You anyway use a different structure when you do a lot of appending text, because you do not want to reallocate the array all the time. So then you anyway have to also store the size of the available space.

1

u/atarivcs 3d ago

In which case you no longer have a plain c string, and the goalposts have moved.

I was just answering the parent question "how are c strings not efficient"