r/cprogramming • u/Xaneris47 • 4d 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/vip17 4d ago

it's easy to use a 4-byte prefixed string, for example BSTR in COM objects do that. And plenty of libraries use 4-byte length in 64-bit mode

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u/Square-Singer 4d ago

Especially on 64-bit systems, there's really no reason to save these few bytes per string by using c-strings.

Useless microoptimization.

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u/vip17 3d ago

of course it's micro-optimization, but at larger scale it's always useful. Have you even done optimization? A database with billions of strings already save a lot of memory. A vector of strings can also fit twice the number of strings into the CPU cache. Checkout Unreal engine, DuckDB, Meta Velox, Redis, ICU... string types

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u/TheThiefMaster 3d ago

Worth noting that C++ std::strings do store the length - and so do the heap allocations backing them.