[camel-cdr]

> Things like small string optimizations in C++ are simply not possible in C.

I don't think this is true, I've seen a bunch of libraries implement SSO in C:

https://nullprogram.com/blog/2016/10/07/

https://github.com/stclib/STC/blob/master/include/stc/cstr.h

https://github.com/mystborn/sso_string/blob/master/include/s...