Literally 25 years ago I was a beginner programmer and tried writing a .dll for Microsoft's Internet Information Server, which was relatively new at the time. (I hadn't so much as seen a Unix-based OS at the time, let alone understood CGI). C strings were mind boggling and frustrated me so much I simply gave up. Happily around the same time, MS introduced Active Server Pages and I was able to use that and never messed with C again. It's amazing the same issues still exist decades later.
That is the most mind-boggling part of this saga to me. People have been using C since the 1970s. It's now 2023, and there still isn't an obvious solution to this other than suggestions that every team should write their own string library from scratch.
And apparently it all started with some genius deciding that using a single 0-byte at the end is so deliciously efficient and therefore obviously the way to go. We can't waste 4 bytes for the string length, that's out of the question. I think only the Pascal solution of having a single byte for the string length is worse.
