The problem is that a frightening number of people don't bother to write the half-dozen obvious wrappers around this, and stdlib doesn't provide them either:
> The problem is that a frightening number of people don't bother to write the half-dozen obvious wrappers around this
That's likely because having to pass it in and out of functions and libs that don't expect your special structure might cause it to have an invalid length, and then all your special wrappers can become a liability and not an advantage through either assuming your bufs are valid, or defensively checking more than is necessarily because they can't know whether it was altered or not.
> stdlib doesn't provide them either
Which is the real problem. That would make them a de facto standard, and a lot (but probably not all) of the problems would be mitigated by people accepting the performance trade offs needed to make them safe.
struct buf { uint8_t * base, size_t size };