> Because since those libraries are not built-in types, you always need to convert back to a ptr and length values at some point when interoperating with other

> Because since those libraries are not built-in types, you always need to convert back to a ptr and length values at some point when interoperating with other C code. And that's exactly why C wins, in my opinion. Because that means interoperability. Storing a pointer + length pair in a fixed layout struct is bad from a normalization standpoint. They are independent data. If you don't separate them you will end up with data redundancies as soon as you have parallel arrays. If you use dynamic vectors and in C++ or similar languages and you ask yourself which is the object that you should call .size() on, that's when you notice that it's morally wrong to bundle pointer + length.