Reminds me of an article[1] that described how he cut GTA Online loading times by 70% because strlen was getting called for effectively every character in a string
I remember reading this blog post when it was first published, but the subsequent updates are better than I would've ever expected this to turn out. Worth checking it out again if you've seen it before :)
Exactly, you can't write clean concise code when working with c strings. Almost every c string manipulation requires cognitive load: "Is the buffer size enough (including null terminator), should I reallocate it?", "I need to have the offset from the last concat, to make next concats performant", "Umm, shold I put null terminator at i or i + 1?"... It really sucks, it's akin to death by thousands of cuts.
[1]: https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...