Yeah, there's not really a guaranteed-valid buffer concept in Go. Even if you have valid UTF-8, you still have to iterate over it to e.g. rasterize glyphs, and

Yeah, there's not really a guaranteed-valid buffer concept in Go. Even if you have valid UTF-8, you still have to iterate over it to e.g. rasterize glyphs, and iterating over possibly-bad UTF-8 is no harder than iterating over known-good UTF-8. If you want to compare to other UTF-8, validity alone isn't always sufficient. You often have to e.g. normalize anyway, and normalization should fix up bad UTF-8. Again, a guaranteed-valid buffer type wouldn't win you much.