I also thought of BSTR but in all fairness this idea of prefixing metadata for string types aren't so unique: eg Delphi's string types use a similar scheme: htt

I also thought of BSTR but in all fairness this idea of prefixing metadata for string types aren't so unique: eg Delphi's string types use a similar scheme: https://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/Alexandria/en/Internal_Data_Formats_(Delphi)#Long_String_Types https://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/Alexandria/en/Inte... One obvious advantage of such scheme of course is that you can pass them as-is to C APIs