This just isn't true. In Windows paths are UCS2 i.e. arbitary sequences of unicode code units, inclusing unpaired surrogates. This means that there are paths th

This just isn't true. In Windows paths are UCS2 i.e. arbitary sequences of unicode code units, inclusing unpaired surrogates. This means that there are paths that will work on Windows but cannot be encoded as e.g. valid UTF-8. As a result Rust has a bespoke encoding just for representing Windows paths in a way that's compatible with UTF-8 ("WTF-8"). It also means that you can't make a guaranteed lossless conversion from a filesystem path to a Rust string; you have to handle the possibility of errors. On Mac paths are some weird NFKD-ish thing, so equality comparisons are complicated. As a rule, if you think that filesystem paths as easy then you're probably ignoring all the edge cases. In application where you don't deal with arbitary user files that's fine. In a programming language that's a huge design error.