I think that if you treat strings as just lists[0] of UTF-8 code units, and code points, grapheme clusters, etc. are just views/adapters of those bytes, you're

I think that if you treat strings as just lists[0] of UTF-8 code units, and code points, grapheme clusters, etc. are just views/adapters of those bytes, you're probably going to benefit the most. [0]: When I say 'lists', I mean whatever the standard idea of a sequence of things is in the language. For C that's the array, or maybe the pointer+length pair. For Go it's a slice. For Rust, an iterator perhaps? For Python, it's a list.