I wonder if they used BSTR. Which was made for COM and OLE. Iirc vb and vbscript basically spoke COM. Each BSTR is on the COM heap, and they have just one leng

I wonder if they used BSTR. Which was made for COM and OLE. Iirc vb and vbscript basically spoke COM. Each BSTR is on the COM heap, and they have just one length field, no notion of "capacity". So you don't get amortized constant time appends. The NT kernel had UNICODE_STRING which had a capacity. So many string types...