When I developed D, a major priority was string handling. I was inspired by Basic, which had very straightforward, natural strings. The goal was to be as good as Basic strings.

And it wasn't hard to achieve. The idea was to use length delimited strings rather than 0 terminated. This meant that slices of strings being strings is a superpower. No more did one have to constantly allocate memory for a slice, and then keep track of that memory.

Length-delimited also super speeded string manipulation. One no longer had to scan a string to find its length. This is a big deal for memory caching.

Static strings are length delimited too, but also have a 0 at the end, which makes it easy to pass string literals to C functions like printf. And, of course, you can append a 0 to a string anytime.

Just want to off-topic-nerd-out for a second and thank you for Empire.