As with many languages, Lisp and C have special support for logical arrays of characters, going so far as to give them a special name, “strings”. In that spirit, CFFI provides special support for translating between Lisp and C strings.
The :string type and the symbols related below also serve as an
example of what you can do portably with CFFI; were it not
included, you could write an equally functional strings.lisp
without referring to any implementation-specific symbols.