It would be so nice if C had "fat pointers" (ptr+len). It's such an obvious small change that would have a massive impact on usability and safety.
Unfortunately, C is dead. Microsoft thinks C is dead, and intentionally keeps their compiler awful. Even ISO WG doesn't seem to have a vision for C's future and have been rearranging deck chairs for the last 20 years.
We already know C's future.
The people using old C are self-selected as those who like it the way it is. They accepted atomics because of new hardware. The place to ask for new, better stuff is at the C++ desk, and it has lots already.
Re:Why is strlen so complex in C?
by klingonopera on Monday August 26, 2019 @11:32PM
(#20806106)
Well, it has. You just said so, it's (ptr+len).
...it's the philosophy of the C language: There's minimal bloat on the upside, but you have to know what you're doing and how to be able get it on the downside.
That's like saying C doesn't need pointers in the type system, because it already has pointer-sized integers (BCPL actually had that philosophy).
Slices greatly improve interfaces. Especially if you want to return a (sub)slice of something, C doesn't have any non-clunky solution.
I wouldn't call ASCIIZ arrays "strings" anymore.
Strings need to be nowadays all unicode, where most use utf-8. None of that is in the standard. Only very minor unicode support and no utf-8.
There are many technical details to be worked out and choices to be made but there is no fundamental intractable problem preventing it. We'd have incremental adoption over many years. Maybe some legacy code would never be updated.
The primary blocker is getting the committee members to admit this is a problem that should be solved. That is difficult enough here on HN, where some people are still arguing that C is fine as-is and we just need to invent better programmers / better tools.
Ultimately C's lack of better string support comes from its lack of better array support. That comes from a certain subset of the programmer community that believes the status-quo is fine and isn't interested in such changes.