Seems to me that it would also prevent tools like the address sanitizer and valgrind from detecting some invalid memory accesses (corresponding to negative inde

Seems to me that it would also prevent tools like the address sanitizer and valgrind from detecting some invalid memory accesses (corresponding to negative indexes). A "more conventional" string library [1] might be safer. [1] for example: https://github.com/websnarf/bstrlib/blob/master/bstrlib.txt https://github.com/websnarf/bstrlib/blob/master/bstrlib.txt