That's harsh, but probably true. There might have been good reason to make null-terminated strings the default in the past (e.g. K&R C not passing structs by va

That's harsh, but probably true. There might have been good reason to make null-terminated strings the default in the past (e.g. K&R C not passing structs by value), but it has little meaning today. The arguable memory overhead of length-prefixed strings is outweighed by the significant performance and safety benefits. Considering that stubborn programmers are still using strcpy() and its ilk to this very day and the billions of dollars lost every year to cybercrime, then I don't think it's harsh.