This is maybe a little less a cry for help and more of a vent, but why the heck did the JVM people decide that the only way for you to allocate a C string for panama was to allocate a buffer by getting the size of the string in bytes and then not provide you a way to get the length of a string in bytes without copying the entire string into a byte array?
I was able to find a resolution to this, but it wasn't particularly obvious where it was.