I am finding hard to imagine not seeing the difficulty here, so instead I’m just gonna point out simple operations like stripping whitespace, splitting strings on a character pattern, changing case, dealing with character encodings, regex matches all require manually iterating and mutating or copying strings and in the case of regexes require compiling and auditing various libraries. The abstractions other standard libraries have used, such as rust, make it much easier to simply express the string operations as high level operations and spend your time elsewhere while retaining relatively high levels of performance. Often, string processing is not in the inner loop and does not benefit from things like combining multiple string operations into a single pass, traditionally a thing that might make c perform better all other things being equal.