For most people, the time difference between reading 4/8 bytes and scanning for a null terminator is negligible, but there’s the other benefit of not having to

For most people, the time difference between reading 4/8 bytes and scanning for a null terminator is negligible, but there’s the other benefit of not having to worry as much about buffer overruns; If you append to a std::string and its internal buffer is full, it’ll realloc() its buffer. This does have the problem of the possibility of a realloc(), but I prefer that over buffer overruns.