[wahern]

No other language solves this perfectly either, certainly not in a way that interoperates _across_ languages and environments.[1] Which is pretty much the whole point of the article. But what C excels at is the ability to write code which can examine and work with the representation of most string-like objects exported from any environment. The difficulty of doing so is a function of how opaque and complex the alien implementation.

I gave up on trying to solve strings in C applications a long time ago, too, much as you have. I did so not because I found C too inexpressive, but because I realized that I was trying to shoe-horn too many concepts into a "string". A string is almost by definition the wrong data structure--either too abstract or not abstract enough--for almost everything. Not coincidentally, that was about the same time I stopped abusing regular expressions for parsing data.

[1] Even C++ didn't solve this. We're still in the midst of a std::string ABI compatibility break in the C++ ecosystem. Granted, it's been about 12 years since the last one, but these last fairly long because systems software (i.e. infrastructure software) has a really long tail.

[cozzyd]

Not to mention that in C++ there are plenty of string implementations predating std::string (e.g QT's QString, ROOT's TString)