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> with the first byte containing the length of the actual string

And the wheels fall off with the first string longer than 255 characters.

Which is why Free Pascal strings are so awesome. I've personally stuffed a billion bytes on one, without issues. They are automatic reference counted, and as close to magic as you can get. You can return one from a function without issue.

However, Free Pascal has the worst documentation of any major project I've ever encountered (The exact opposite of Turbo Pascal), so I can't link to a good reference. Their Wiki is a black hole of nuance and sucks all useful stuff off the internet.

You can fix this issue by using a variable width integer encoding for the size.

It might fix that particular issue, but you still have the same problem that NUL terminated strings have: it's not possible to cheaply create views/slices of a string using the same type.

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