I don't find the advantages of null-terminated strings you cite compelling. They sound like relatively rare operations, and compared to the severity and quantit

I don't find the advantages of null-terminated strings you cite compelling. They sound like relatively rare operations, and compared to the severity and quantity of security problems caused by null-terminated strings it seems like a particularly bad trade-off. An advantage of storing strings with length and optionally start positions is that arbitrary slices can be defined, which reuse underlying data; this covers your examples of splitting by a delimiter and reusing suffixes. The argument that serialization would be harder is not really particular to the string format in question, that is always something that needs to be defined well, preferably with static typing (encoding issues make file formats complicated either way, if anything, storing a length attribute encourages to also store an encoding attribute while you're at it).