Null-terminated strings really are a mistake. Make vectorized algorithms problematic by forcing them to account for page size and paged memory in general as well as always scan for NUL, cannot be easily sliced without re-allocation, are opposite to how languages with better string primitives define them and in general don't save much by passing a single pointer over ptr + length.
It's not really possible to get rid of them in C++ however, given a staggering amount of legacy APIs that require them. Constantly converting every time you have to call a system API with your string is even worse.
FWIW Rust also has null-terminated strings available under its std::ffi module. I’m not sure it would be feasible to migrate C++ to the approach of multiple string types now, and I’m not sure it would have been the right approach for C++11 given C++’s approach to interop, but it’s definitely possible to support interoperability with those legacy APIs without constraining a default string type to null-termination.
