I’ve seen this technique used in old codebases for strings. A typedef was made for a char* whose -1 address was a count and there wasn’t a zero terminator. This

I’ve seen this technique used in old codebases for strings. A typedef was made for a char* whose -1 address was a count and there wasn’t a zero terminator. This was useful since string length checks were now O(1) and string manipulation can take a surprising amount of time in CPU bound programs. It was an interesting idea but you needed a whole new set of string functions and bridge functions. It takes a runtime (or codebase) wide commitment to make it work.