It's all fun and games until you say

    ++p

and pass that to a function that is silently expecting a length and other stuff in front of it. Calling these things "pointers" is a bit of a promotion from what they really are. Naming them "char*" or whatever is pretty dangerous if you ever do pointer movement.

Seriously, if you want descriptors and typed blobs, just make up a struct for what you want and pass it around. Say what you mean. Lying like this is going to hurt you.