Just because strings are length prefixed, doesn't mean that they don't need to be dynamically allocated. The reason they can be put on the stack is that the pre

Just because strings are length prefixed, doesn't mean that they don't need to be dynamically allocated. The reason they can be put on the stack is that the prefix is just one byte and thus the maximum length 255 bytes for the strings. Prefixed strings can even be a source of buffer overflows, if you don't check if the length is smaller than the actual length of the rest of the data. In fact this was actually the source of the heartbleed bug.