[imron]

> This is in no way just a C thing to deal with all that nonsense. I've not seen any language or library that I'd say does it "well" and saves individual programmers from considering the above.

This is true, however even something as simple as storing the (byte) length as part of the string reduces the complexity and the likelihood for bugs.

Other languages also prevent accidental buffer overruns so while they still need to deal with all the same Unicode problems you mentioned, the program likely won't crash if the programmer gets things wrong. The same is not necessarily true of C.