Multithreading is the stronger positive. I'm guessing 8-bit strings is a minor positive, on the basis that you really don't need to deal with non-ASCII text in

Multithreading is the stronger positive. I'm guessing 8-bit strings is a minor positive, on the basis that you really don't need to deal with non-ASCII text in that kind of setting, and there's probably some performance benefit to not supporting it. Even if you stick to characters from 7-bit ASCII in your own data, if the strings are technically UTF-8 or UTF-16, then the fact that it's a variable-length encoding means that more string operations will involve costly branch instructions. And if UTF-32, your strings will be 4x as big as they need to be. Not working on non-Unix is neutral. There's no benefit to it, but nothing was going to be running on Windows, anyway, so there'd have been no harm in it, either.