You don't need to support all multibyte encodings (i.e. DBCS, UCS-2, UCS-4, UTF-16 or UTF-32) characters if you're able to normalise all input to UTF-8.

I think, when you are building a system, restricting all (human language) input to be UTF-8 is a fair and reasonable design decision, and then you can use strlen to your hearts content.

> I avoid doing this. Just use `struct string { ... };'. It makes it clear what you're handling.

Well then imagine if Gtk made you write `struct GtkLabel`, etc. and you saw hundreds of `struct` on the screen taking up space in heavy UI code. Sometimes abstractions are worthwhile.

Now I think is between no good idea, and absolutely awful.

Yes, sometimes you wish some thing were different in a programming language “if only these types had shorter names”. But when you work in a team, first you should have consensus, and then modifying the language becomes a heavy load, that every new person in the project will have to lift.

“Modifying C is porting the Lisp curse to C” is my motto. Use all as standard, vanilla as possible.

You're thinking in decades. C standard committee is slower than that. This could have worked in practice, but probably never will happen in practice. Maybe people should start considering a language like D[1] as an alternative, which seems to have the spirit of both C and Go, but with much more pragmatism than either.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D_(programming_language)#Criti...

    typedef struct foo_ foo;
    enum { FOO_SIZE = 64 };
    foo *foo_init(void *p, size_t sz);
    void foo_destroy(foo *p);
    #define FOO_ALLOCA() \
      foo_init(alloca(FOO_SIZE), FOO_SIZE)

    struct foo_ {
        uint32_t magic;
        uint32_t val;
    };
    
    foo *foo_init(void *p, size_t sz) {
        foo *f = (foo *)p;
        f->magic = 1234;
        f->val = 0;
        return f;
    }

    foo *f = FOO_ALLOCA();
    // Can’t see inside
    // APIs validate magic

This is nothing new in C. This problem has always existed by virtue of all struct members being public. Generally, programmers know to search the header file / documentation for constructor functions, instead of doing raw struct instantiation. Don‘t underestimate how good documentation can drive correct programming choices.

C++ is worse in this regard, as constructors don‘t really allow this pattern, since they can‘t return a None / false. The alternative is to throw an exception, which requires a runtime similar to malloc.

For instance, it appears that no amount of proper discipline, even in the best developers, allows to replace proper array support with a naked pointer to a memory area.

This one was a head-scratcher for me. Yeah, there's no cost to check for it, but architectures where CHAR_BIT != 8 are rarer even than 24-bit architectures.

As someone who spent most of their career as an embedded dev, yes, this is fine for (like parent said) some types of software.

Even for places where you'd think this is a bad idea, it's still can be a good approach, for example allocating and mapping all memory up to the limit you are designing. Honestly this is how engineering is done - you have specified limits in the design, and you work explicitly to those limits.

So "allocate everything at startup" need not be "allocate everything at program startup", it can be "allocate everything at workflow startup", where "workflow" can be a thread, a long-running input-directed sequence of functions, etc.

For example, I am starting a tiny stripped down web-server for a project, and my approach is going to be a single 4Kb[1] block for each request, allocated via a pool (which can expand on pressure up to some maximum) and returned to the pool once the response is sent.

The 4Kb includes at most 14 headers (regardless of each headers size) with the remaining data for the JSON payload. The JSON payload is limited to at most 10 fields. This makes parsing everything "allocate-less" because the array holding pointers to the keys+values of the header is `const char *headers[14]` and to the payload JSON data `const char *fields[10]`.

A request that doesn't fit in any of that will be rejected. This means that everything is simple and the allocation for each request happens once at startup (pool creation) even while parsing the input.

I'm toying with the idea of doing the same for responses too, instead of writing it out as and when the output is determined during the servicing of the request.

-------------------------

[1] I might switch to 6Kb or 8Kb if requests need more; whatever number is chosen, it's going to be a static number.

One other thing I tend to do anything that needs to live longer than the current call stack gets copied into a queue of some sort. I feel it's kinda doing manually what rusts borrow checker tries to enforce.

Only allocate on the heap if you absolutely have to.

It's a pretty neat way to drop some corner cases from your mental load without building subtle traps

In a programming language that doesn't enforce types, how do you implement

> "Parsing leaves you with a new data structure matching a type, validation checks if some data technically complies with a type (but might not later be parsed correctly)".

I'll ditch type-safety in experimental/exploratory code; I'll use Lisp (or, more recently, Python) to test if something is a good idea. For anything that ships to production, I think a basic level of type enforcement is necessary, even if you don't want the whole type zoo.

For your Javascript f/end context, I like the proposed TC39 approach (https://github.com/tc39/proposal-type-annotations?tab=readme...). The typing is optional, does not break existing syntax and can still be used to enforce a basic level of type safety if the developer wants it.

----------------------------

[1] I upvoted you anyway. Your broader point is still valid.

Given the C++ adoption on 1990's commercial software and major consumer operating systems (Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Be), I bet if the FSF with their coding guidelines had not advocated for C, the adoption would not taken off beyond those days.

"Using a language other than C is like using a non-standard feature: it will cause trouble for users. Even if GCC supports the other language, users may find it inconvenient to have to install the compiler for that other language in order to build your program. So please write in C."

The GNU Coding Standard in 1994, http://web.mit.edu/gnu/doc/html/standards_7.html#SEC12

And yet another C++ person salty that people prefer simpler things.