Hmm, reading the source it looks like he is using His sds string library, which has Len, size and a asciiz char* member. When last I checked he does pass the char* around (because it is null terminated) but he also sometimes will do pointer math to get back to the sds
You're right; I was reacting to the count of char\s+star and snprintf calls, but only fair to chalk Redis up among the packages I have that rely on a high-level string library.