Has anyone implemented a replacement for string.h using a struct to store the string and length?

Question

In the C standard library, strings are implemented using an array of chars, terminated by a null character: '\0'. Such ASCIZ strings lead to inefficiency because every time we need to know the length of a string, we need to iterate over it looking for '\0'.

The way around this is to store the length of the string when we create it, e.g. using a struct as follows:

typedef struct cstring_ {
    size_t nchars;
    char chars[0];
} cstring;

Has anyone made a shared library implementing the string.h functions, but using a struct instead of char * to pass strings around?

If not, is there a specific reason why this would be a bad idea?

Answer 1

There are probably dozens of those. Have a look at Glib's GString for example.