> Sure there are, as proven by distributed networking stacks not written in C.
this has nothing to do with the C language, but the structure of information. If the datatype contains a length, it has to be serialized anyway. There is no way of fixing this.
There is no alternative to network protocols and IPC that the stringtypes C has. You get a length and a byte array. If you trust the user, you can assume length is correct. Otherwise no.