It would be 2/3rds of a Go slice. You have a fat pointer with the capacity of the array it is pointing to. If you want to implement shorter strings, you would h

It would be 2/3rds of a Go slice. You have a fat pointer with the capacity of the array it is pointing to. If you want to implement shorter strings, you would have to store the length independently, or use 0 termination. You still would have the length information as a safeguard of overflowing the array. You still could do everything, what you can do with current C strings, just safer. One could have fat pointers to array elements to, just with an accordingly shorter capacity. In the end, I think the Go slices are the consequential implementation of safe fat pointers, having both the capacity and length and allowing efficient and still safe reslicing. The overhead of having 24 vs 8 bytes per pointer on a 64 bit machine should be worth it in modern times.