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> All the listed weaknesses also have benefits. For instance it is easy to get a substring without need to copy.

To make substring in some other languages, you need to store pointer to beginning of the substring and length of substring.

To make substring in C, you need to store pointer to beginning of the substring and put '\0' into original string.

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> To make substring in some other languages, you need to store pointer to beginning of the substring and length of substring.

Plus a pointer to the beginning, plus a reference counter as the user expects it to manage lifetime. In C this is the user's job. Where they know the life time is guaranteed they can optimize.

I coded in C for over a decade. Never did I need a reference counter.

No, you store offset + length.

You can't use any of the stdlib string functions if you don't have that \0 at the end though, right?

Is there any function you would miss? Of those, which one couldn't you recreate in 5 straightforward lines of code?

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