And worth noting, Objective-C’s strings (actually Foundation’s NSString) is UTF-16 because at the time it was implemented UTF-8 had become as universal as it i

And worth noting, Objective-C’s strings (actually Foundation’s NSString) is UTF-16 because at the time it was implemented UTF-8 had become as universal as it is now. UTF-16 still seemed like a possible option. And changing the existing strings from 16-8 would have been a huge undertaking - Swift adds an interoperability layer and more flexible compiler/language that makes the transition much easier, not to mention a whole new standard library that has been designed to make this transition work well.