It's not just that the to/from is a hassle, it's also that you have to deeply understand the gotchas of ASCIIZ strings to safely do that bridging at all --- so pretending it doesn't exist is probably not a good teaching strategy. (I have no opinion about the article and am only commenting on this thread because I like C).

I do not pretend anything about null-terminated strings in the book. In fact, I have many exercises and assignments where they use Valgrind to buffer overflow C strings repeatedly and don't introduce bstring until much later.

Sorry, I haven't read your book, meant to be clear that I was talking in the abstract, but I can see after rereading I wasn't clear enough.

I use bstring but there's a few others. Generally it's the easiest way to avoid some common buffer overflows and other problems.