>Pascal strings? Yeah, that’s probably the better call, but why not use C++ or Rust or something where a bunch of geniuses got it right already?

I'll be diving into C fairly heavy for the first time ever next year. I intend to skip right past pascal strings and implement/use free pascal's AnsiString or UnicodeString, both of which are reference counted, have a length (with no limit) and are guaranteed null terminated. I've stored a gigabyte in them in a few milliseconds. There's no need to allocate or free memory either... it's like freaking magic.

Haven't seen that many refcounted string libraries for C in recent times, most common one is probably still the one from glib.

I guess you're going to implement your from scratch, or is there some prior art you're likely to use?

If at all possible, I'll just lift the one from Free Pascal. Otherwise, it's yet another chore in the process of bringing MStoical (a modern port of the STOIC language) to life

Too many geniuses spoil the soup. We all see many of thousands of recipes and techniques over the course of our careers and it makes sense that each of us are continuously curating the small subset that we reach for in every project. I enjoy seeing the workbenches of other craftsmen, and nothing here looks unfamiliar.

Arthur Whitney however is nuts.

You'll find by looking at their older posts that the author has actually written quite a lot of elisp.