> There's nothing stopping us from packing UTF-8 bytes into a UTF-16 string: to use each of the two bytes to store one UTF-8 character. We would need custom enc

> There's nothing stopping us from packing UTF-8 bytes into a UTF-16 string: to use each of the two bytes to store one UTF-8 character. We would need custom encoders and decoders, but it's possible. And it would avoid the need to re-encode the string at any system boundary. I'm guessing you'd have to write a C++ module for this, but any suggestions on how one might do this successfully?