Although C has many useful features, Text or string handling is not one of them. Unless you are writing text adventures, this is probably not a big deal and even games like Asteroids do write text messages, show the score etc.

Givn C’s age, it’s not surprising that people have tried to improve on C’s strings (char *) and one that I came across is the Better string library. The library is stand alone, portable and known to work with gcc/g++, MSVC++, Intel C++, WATCOM C/C++, Turbo C, Borland C++, IBM’s native CC compiler on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. If you are bothered by buffer overflow type bugs, this is one area that BSL can definitely improve on. Note although the main documentation is just one text file, it is a very long file!

I haven’t tested it with clang but if it works with gcc the odds are it will work with clang.

I’ve added it to the C code links page.