That&#x27;s harsh, but probably true. There might have been good reason to make null-terminated strings the default in the past (e.g. K&amp;R C not passing structs by value), but it has little meaning today. The arguable memory overhead of length-prefixed strings is outweighed by the significant performance and safety benefits.<p>Considering that stubborn programmers are still using strcpy() and its ilk to this very day and the billions of dollars lost every year to cybercrime, then I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s harsh.