[Johanx64]

Dude, every sane language out there does this. Just generally with 4byte prefix. Null-terminated stuff has always been backwards compat stuff.

Pascal strings - historically and why people even remember this being an issue - were up to 255 chars in size, if not you had to use different string type.

You might still want raw pointers for all sorts of low level stuff, but you almost never want to have null-terminated strings for anything but back-compat, one of the worst things ever, even on memory constrained systems.