Comment by eru
2 years ago
> On the other hand, his recommendation to always know string lengths and use memcpy didn't really become common practice over the last 20+ years either, so I'm not sure it was worth all the arguing.
It hasn't become common practice in C. But other languages (like JavaScript or Python) have become hugely popular, and don't use null-terminated strings.
Even languages in C's niche encode strings as pointer + length, like Rust.
> On the other hand, his recommendation to always know string lengths and use memcpy didn't really become common practice over the last 20+ years either
It was the way plenty of languages from the 70s stored their strings, including such popular ones as BASIC.
It has in the sense that people allocate strings much more than using fixed-size, stack-allocated arrays.
Modern C uses things like glib's GString, which (in addition to keeping the NUL terminator) track the length and can resize the underlying memory. And people also use a lot more asprintf instead of strcpy and strcat.