If anything, null-terminated strings are bad for performance as often as good for it. One example that comes up reasonably often: comparing strings that have di

If anything, null-terminated strings are bad for performance as often as good for it. One example that comes up reasonably often: comparing strings that have different lengths but common prefixes is fast with length-tagged (Pascal-style) strings, but expensive with C-style strings, because you have to scan both strings until you find either a string end, or a difference. So instead of quickly answering "not equal" after one integer comparison, you could end up doing hundreds (or thousands) of byte comparisons in degenerate cases. Anything that calls strlen() also ends up doing extra work.