They have one advantage, which is saving 3 bytes of memory (depending on what you decide your max supported string length should be) per string. It's hard to im

They have one advantage, which is saving 3 bytes of memory (depending on what you decide your max supported string length should be) per string. It's hard to imagine an environment where that's a worthwhile tradeoff, even in the most constrained embedded systems (where you can probably get away with a 16-bit length field and thus only save one byte), but they're not completely without merit.