The basic idea is to wrap all use of arrays with wrapper functions or macros that take the structure with length and have those wrappers access the array after performing bounds checking. So you would want to never pass a raw array as a function argument, but before compound literals there was fundamentally no good way to change a string literal to such a structure in a function argument that wouldn't violate other basic programming principles. There are still a variety of implementation choices and it is by no means an easy retrofit, but the result can be entirely reasonable. Interacting with 3rd party and standard library code can be awkward and depends on implementation choices (e.g. '\0' termination or not and the related how much of libc do you rewrite). There have been a number of string libraries over the years making various implementation choices, but no general implementation has become all that popular and it seems like most implementations are project specific.