C String Libraries

What are your experiences from using C string libraries (bstring and friends)? I'm starting a project that I'm going to write in ANSI C and that is quite heavy on string processing, and having support for actual strings (as opposed to null-terminated arrays) would be a real time saver. And no, I'm not going to use glib or any other `let's make C something else entirely' solution.

>>3,4
I considered other languages (mainly Lisp and Python, because I know them), but one of the main requirements of this particular piece of software is to compile out of the box without any additional asshattery on basically any platform in existence to a small binary. C is the only language I know and am willing to use that satisfies this property.