C is minimal and orthogonal. It doesn't have bounds information because it's not clear how to do that. If you look in other languages, you can find these altern

C is minimal and orthogonal. It doesn't have bounds information because it's not clear how to do that. If you look in other languages, you can find these alternatives: - OOP with garbage collection: Need to pass around containers and iterators by references. Bad for modularity (the container type is a hell of a lot more of a dependency than a pointer to the element type). And not everybody wants GC to begin with, not in the space where C is an interesting option. - Passing around slices / fat pointers with size information. Not as bad for modularity, but breaks if the underlying range changes. - Passing around non-GCed pointers to containers (say std::vector<int>& vec): Again, more dependencies (C++ compilation times...). And it still breaks if the container is itself part of a container that might be moved (say std::vector<std::vector<int>>. - With Rust there is now a variation which brings more safety to the third option (borrow checker). I don't have experience with it, but as I gather it's not a perfect solution since people are still trying to improve on the scheme (because too many good programs are rejected, in other words maybe it's not yet flexible enough?). So it's still unclear to me if that's a good tradeoff. None of these options are orthogonal language features, and #2 and #3 easily break, while the first one is often not an option for performance reasons. All are significantly worse where modularity is important (!!!). I personally prefer to pass size information manually, and a few little macros can make my life easier. It causes almost no problems, and I can develop software so much more easily this way. I have grown used to a particular style where I use lots of global data and make judicious use of void pointers. It's very flexible and modular and I have only few problems with it. YMMV.