Comment by jerf

32-bit is so little overhead that we don't blink at adding 64 to our strings nowadays, because of the benefits we get from alignment.

But remember the first Macintosh shipped with 128KB of RAM, 131,072 bytes. Three more bytes per string hurts a lot more there...

... although, that said, even in that era given the number of errors that null-terminated strings caused, even completely ignoring security, I do still wonder if at least defaulting to 2 bytes of length and doing something special for strings over 64K still wouldn't have been the right tradeoff, even in the case of short strings. Today we mostly focus on security, but null-terminated strings also caused a lot of just plain-old bugs. But so did 1-byte length strings... it's way too easy to run out of 256 characters even on those old systems.