A case against: • On the most widely used architectures, reading a string is much easier if the string is a known length. x86 has its string instructions, ARM

A case against: • On the most widely used architectures, reading a string is much easier if the string is a known length. x86 has its string instructions, ARM has its Load Multiple instructions. • Even with length-prefixed strings, many uses of short strings are with string literals and so the length does not need to be stored anywhere.