alt Hacker NewsWell, not saying to always use it, but if the string size is big enough, the overhead of 2 ints becomes relatively vanishing. For generic dynamically sized strings it probably has more advantages than disadvantages. But in any case, sure, if every single byte matters or some structure requires specific memory layout, then fine. I just don't think these things are the majority of use cases. Keep in mind that the cached lengths can increase performance, since you don't have to recalculate string lengths.
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I am a terrible hobby c programmer that doesn't understand pointers but surely a symmetric approach doesn't have the overhead or the bug. that is to say that if the language was designed to work in single bit pairs of a string character in conjunction of a string length character assuming a fail safe design of one dummy string character then if a bug happens in the code then there's no overflow because the length can never be shorter than the character.
> Well, not saying to always use it, but if the string size is big enough, the overhead of 2 ints becomes relatively vanishing.
In that case, the fix is not to change C strings (breaking a lot of existing code), but to introduce a stringbuilder type.