> The second, for example, can easily replace C strings, you only need to pass one more size_t into functions dealing with strings. C doesn't prevent you from

> The second, for example, can easily replace C strings, you only need to pass one more size_t into functions dealing with strings. C doesn't prevent you from creating such a string type, or just passing a separate length as argument to functions. In fact it's the right thing to do (pointer + length) in many cases. All C does is offer you string literals that are zero-terminated, which is typically practical. Often those are all you need, i.e. to store a plain-text identifier that doesn't allow for NUL characters anyway - so NUL can be used as a sentinel for efficient storage. Then there is the C standard library, which is a bag of bad practice. Just ignore 90% of the stuff in there. stuff like strtok() etc. is bad. Mostly you want to use memcpy(), memcmp(), strcmp(), maybe strcpy()/strncpy() etc. Then there's stuff like malloc()/free() and stdio and especially the formatting functions that you can use to get something up and running before possibly replacing them with something better. Well, that's about it:-)