Comment by jcranmer

> Is it really too late for the C committee to not develop a modern string library that ships with base C26 or C27? I get that they really hate adding features, but C strings have been a problem for over 50 years now, and I'm not advocating for the old strings to be removed or even deprecated at this time. Just that a modern replacement be available and to encourage people to use them for new code.

The next version of C (C2y) is expected to be C29, not C26 or C27. And work has been done on a new string library: see, e.g. https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n3306.pdf (not the only proposal!). That said, I would be surprised if anything gets merged into the standard in less than a decade, simply because the committee is not organizationally set up for major library overhauls like this.