C Strings: A 50-Year Mistake – By Trần Thành Long

longtran2904.substack.com

12 pointsrbanffy3 comments

In my projects I tried pretty hard to remake the world and get rid of C strings. Went all in on freestanding C, got rid of the standard library, developed my own abstractions.

But I just didn't quite make it. The operating system interfaces want C strings. Can't even open a file without C strings. To fully exorcise C strings, I would need to reinvent Linux. I haven't got enough lifetimes for the task.

Ended up tacking on a hidden trailing NUL to every single buffer instead.

when i first started programming in the early 90s we had someone on our team keep adding strcat("this string", NULL); His name was Karl. Every time we saw bad coding practices we called it Karl code.

We had a "Karl" at my first engineering job. Karl happened to be our team lead, but he produced a lot of Karl code. Many expletives and facepalms in that office. It got so bad, a member on our team that was highly religious asked to have their own office (and he got it).

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