alt Hacker NewsIt's fine as a serialization/deserialization primitive for on-disk files, as long as the NULL character is invalid.
String tables in most object file formats work like that, a concatenated series of ASCIIZ strings. One byte of overhead (NUL), requires only an offset into one to address a string and you can share strings with common suffixes. It's a very compact layout.
Nothing prevents you from using a shared pool of strings that don't have null terminator. It can even be more efficient, since you don't have the null byte to handle at string end. Depending on the maximum string length you want to support, it doesn't even have to take more space.