OK, I see how what I said could mean that. What I meant was: if using the language's internal string representation gives poor performance/resource usage, bette

OK, I see how what I said could mean that. What I meant was: if using the language's internal string representation gives poor performance/resource usage, better to avoid it and directly manipulate the undecoded bytes. Most languages allow you to control when loaded data is converted to strings; simply don't convert it, and uh reimplement stdlib functions to work with your preferred encoding.