C Strings are Terrible!

C strings are null-terminated byte arrays with no built-in length, making operations like right-trimming destructive or requiring heap allocation. The post walks through C string internals (pointer arithmetic, read-only data sections, segfaults) and then introduces the string view pattern — a struct holding a pointer and a length — as a superior alternative. Practical implementations of chop-left, chop-right, trim, and split-by-delimiter are built step by step, demonstrating zero-allocation string manipulation. The post concludes that while string views are far better, null-terminated strings are baked into libc and OS syscall interfaces, so developers must still convert between the two.