I don't think it's quite so simple to fix since you still need to decide when to actually check the size vs. when it is safe to omit. While branch predictors ar

I don't think it's quite so simple to fix since you still need to decide when to actually check the size vs. when it is safe to omit. While branch predictors are great, you can end up having so many potential branches that it starts to lose effectiveness. In practice, I rarely see anything besides strings that lack the size variable, it's just that the bounds may not be checked. Null terminated strings were a horrible mistake though and really should have been fat pointers.