bstrlib

It all starts with the basic idea of null terminated *strings* --- which is itself kinda brain dead since they are never anything more (but often less) than an array of bytes. Conceptually simple but highly problematic and computationally inefficient in many (if not most) use cases. The solution is here: https://github.com/websnarf/bstrlib

Wouldn't https://github.com/websnarf/bstrlib be a better URL?

It is, in fact, a good question. The C standard library uses NUL-terminated strings, as it did since the design. And the language allows that anything in double quotes will be a NUL-terminated string. But nothing stops you to store strings another way. There is nothing magic in C for this. Just use whatever layout you like. You "just" need to re-implement any function manipulating strings in all of the C standard library. You can probably re-use the printf family with GCC using a non-standard approach: https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Customizi... And you need to write conversion of any library/program/kernel that expects NUL-terminated strings. And there are libraries that do that, like https://github.com/websnarf/bstrlib (Doc and rationale: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/websnarf/bstrlib/master/bs... ). I've never

Seems to me that it would also prevent tools like the address sanitizer and valgrind from detecting some invalid memory accesses (corresponding to negative indexes). A "more conventional" string library [1] might be safer. [1] for example: https://github.com/websnarf/bstrlib/blob/master/bstrlib.txt

Here's a timely example of the behavior I'm referring to: https://github.com/websnarf/bstrlib/issues/8 I'd be happy to concede that this is not good programming practice, but I do not accept that the compiler is doing us a favor by silently creating this security problem. I do appreciate that gcc at least offers a warning for some of these cases.

I just had to check what happens using a real compiler using realistic compiler options (gcc-4.9.2 -O2): https://github.com/websnarf/bstrlib/issues/8