It doesn't have to be a return value though. You could pass pointers to it as parameters. To answer the question though, a number of people do define structur

It doesn't have to be a return value though. You could pass pointers to it as parameters. To answer the question though, a number of people do define structures containing a buffer and a length (and potentially capacity), there just isn't such a structure standardized so everybody who wants to do this has to bring their own. Some examples from Unix: iovec, sendmsg/recvmsg. Surely there are others I'm just not thinking of right now. In the Windows world you have UNICODE_STRING and similar structures. SChannel has "PSecBufferDesc". Again, surely there are others. And prominent libraries might also have their own.