>Doing this sort of thing efficiently may also mean that you're tempted to remove something like a bounds check. After all, if you already know that the value is 5 bytes, why check on every access? People really want parsers to be fast.

In what kind of software bounds check have this significant perf. penalty?

The only people I've heard talking about such a stuff were firmware devs.

>Further, in C, buffers don't have lengths attached to them. In every other language you typically don't work with null terminated strings. So now you have to manage sizes of things throughout your parser.

Cannot C have some wrapper over those poor strings

that leads to better safety? dev's experience, etc, etc?