Hypothetically, C could use the first `sizeof (size_t)` bytes to store the length. Endianness shouldn't be much of an issue; just use the endianness of the current machine. You don't typically write the NUL terminator when writing a string to a file; similarly, you wouldn't typically write the length field when writing a counted string to a file.
I agree that NUL-terminated strings were the right decision at the time (and aren't that bad now), but there are sane ways to do counted strings.
You piqued my interest, and it looks like NUL-terminated strings in files is actually common. tar, ELF, JPEG, gzip all use them. When the serialization format matches the in-memory format, you can mmap directly into a struct, which is fast and convenient.
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Hypothetically, C could use the first `sizeof (size_t)` bytes to store the length. Endianness shouldn't be much of an issue; just use the endianness of the current machine. You don't typically write the NUL terminator when writing a string to a file; similarly, you wouldn't typically write the length field when writing a counted string to a file.
I agree that NUL-terminated strings were the right decision at the time (and aren't that bad now), but there are sane ways to do counted strings.
You piqued my interest, and it looks like NUL-terminated strings in files is actually common. tar, ELF, JPEG, gzip all use them. When the serialization format matches the in-memory format, you can mmap directly into a struct, which is fast and convenient.
...and a non-starter if you ever have data interchange between differing types of machines.