Obviously you should use whatever language you want on your projects, but in case you’re interested: > unfortunately, asking rust to treat UTF-8 string as a "b

Obviously you should use whatever language you want on your projects, but in case you’re interested: > unfortunately, asking rust to treat UTF-8 string as a "ball of bytes" is hard, when it's stupidly easy with C. String::as_bytes seems pretty easy, and there are byte literals b'?' of type u8 and b"???" of type [u8]. You can avoid interacting with the UTF-8 types at all if you don’t want to. > Plus, I wanted to use arena-style-allocation where I make huge allocations in one go and then don't think about memory, something that I don't have control over in Rust. Perhaps the bumpalo and typed-arena crates would interest you. https://docs.rs/bumpalo/ https://docs.rs/bumpalo/ https://docs.rs/typed-arena/ https://docs.rs/typed-arena/