Exactly. Any time I start a project, if it's going to working with strings, I automatically pick something else, anything else, besides C, no matter how great

Exactly. Any time I start a project, if it's going to working with strings, I automatically pick something else, anything else, besides C, no matter how great C would have been for the task for performance, because its string-handling is just that bad. C++ isn't great, but it's a lot better. Personally, my favorite for good performance is C++ with Qt. The QString class lets you do a lot of amazing stuff very easily.