> I’m not sure what you mean. Are you suggesting that Python use UTF-8 encoded strings internally instead of decoded Unicode codepoints like it does currently?

> I’m not sure what you mean. Are you suggesting that Python use UTF-8 encoded strings internally instead of decoded Unicode codepoints like it does currently? Correct. Because the current approach completely fell apart when people started using emojis. The internal encoding in too many cases is now always UCS4 which is very wasteful. > All string operations suddenly must be aware of details of UTF encoding, which complicates even simple things immensely. Go, Rust and Swift all show that using UTF-8 internally is not hard. Not sure why you think its hard. I have written a lot of code in those languages now and I feel much happier with their unicode support than Python's.