There are quite a few of these "better C string" idioms floating around. Another one to consider is e.g. https://github.com/antirez/sds https://github.com/anti

There are quite a few of these "better C string" idioms floating around. Another one to consider is e.g. https://github.com/antirez/sds https://github.com/antirez/sds (used by Redis), which instead stores the string contents in-line with the metadata.