I have a personal lib that works like this. It maintains a simple struct with a start pointer and a one-past-the-end pointer. You can use it to construct a view

I have a personal lib that works like this. It maintains a simple struct with a start pointer and a one-past-the-end pointer. You can use it to construct a view or point into unused space at the end of a string for building ops. NUL termination is preserved so interop with stdlib is always available. This allows for nicer string handling while always allowing interop with anything expecting a char *. Libraries with their own string implementation always exact a penalty to get a cstr out.