Tracking sizes for purposes of bounds checking is QoI and I think this is perfectly fine. But here we can also recover the size with sizeof, so it is also requi

Tracking sizes for purposes of bounds checking is QoI and I think this is perfectly fine. But here we can also recover the size with sizeof, so it is also required for compliance: https://godbolt.org/z/qh7P93Tcd https://godbolt.org/z/qh7P93Tcd And I agree that this is a misuse of auto. I only used it here to show that the type we miss already exists inside the C compiler, we simply can name it only by constructing it again: char (buf)[N] = ... but we could simply allow char (buf)[:] = and be done (as suggested by Dennis Richtie: https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/vararray.pdf https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/vararray.pdf)