All kinds. But a lot of it is just that parsers are extremely easy to benchmark and benchmarks promote optimization.
> Cannot C have some wrapper over those poor strings
Sure, but there's nothing native.
But why? strings are used by all programmers everyday
I struggle to understand why you wouldn't want to make them state of the art, or decent at least.
> But why? strings are used by all programmers everyday
Different kinds of strings can have extremely different performance profiles.
A statically allocated string of ASCII (single byte) characters.
A dynamically allocated string of unicode (multibyte) characters where the length of allocation is not known ahead of time is very different. C requires the developer to know the differences and knows how to deal with them treat them.