I don't agree that it is more dangerous than pure C. First, you can do all your operations on strings in 100% C++, which will be aggressively optimized to essen

I don't agree that it is more dangerous than pure C. First, you can do all your operations on strings in 100% C++, which will be aggressively optimized to essentially what you'd be doing with C anyway. Second, keeping the underlying representation as NUL-terminated allows you to use other APIs that consume char * C-style strings by calling c_str(). There is a compile-time const check that forces you to write a cast when calling APIs that do not consume a const char *. If the APIs that you are calling do not modify the string, but merely read it (which is the case for almost all uses), then you can have a C++ app that is completely safe from string buffer overflows. This is called abstracting out an easy-to-make-tragic-mistakes-in problem into a small layer (C++ std::string) and using that layer everywhere.