rapidyaml VS STC

Interesting, I hadn't come across extism before. How hard would it be to package https://github.com/biojppm/rapidyaml in this way? (And do you have a extism for dummies guide?)

The inability, or brittleness, to embed NUL bytes into the string, for once. Zeroed bytes can be valid as an internal bytes of a longer encoded character. And the inefficiency of tempting every caller to rederive the string length on every use, leading to such bugs as quadratic parsing behavior with sscanf. The extra register for an explicit length is a very minute price to pay compared to that.

Although you still have the other problem of sscanf, where read times can become quadratic.

You are really simplifying that issue. A lot of it has to be how the implementation of sscanf works and it's super easy to abuse by complete accident when a lot of data needs to be read and parsed to correct values. See more here: https://github.com/biojppm/rapidyaml/issues/40

Leading to eye-rolling problems like these: https://github.com/biojppm/rapidyaml/issues/40

This technique is often used to implement RAII in C. See example in Standard Template Containers. The library delivers STL-like functionality to C.

I'd say it's evil, but quite understandable very commonly used because there are no built-in alternatives in C. I basically never use void* in user-code, simply because there are no need for it when using a templating technique, like in my STC library. Even in the implementation of STC itself, void* is hardly used, if at all.

Study Other Peoples C Code and here's one that is easy to read: https://github.com/stclib/STC/releases

STC

This is more or less how C-ish templates are implemented in STC library.

As the author of a STL-like templated C container library, I had many of the exact same thoughts when implementing the unordered map. In fact, I also changed to many of the suggestions here, rather than consistently following the C++ umap API. E.g.

Sure it is. C misses a proper efficient generic standard/container library, like my https://github.com/stclib/STC, but that is irrelevant.

Smart Template Containers (STC)

Some data structure and algorithm library in C enable the (optional) separation between the interface of the container (which is expanded in your header) and its implementation (which is expanded in your source), like STC.