> You might find this a bizarre criticism but In Java, Ruby, Elixir, Rust strings are all Unicode with escape hatches for manually handling byte arrays (that co

> You might find this a bizarre criticism but In Java, Ruby, Elixir, Rust strings are all Unicode with escape hatches for manually handling byte arrays (that could be C strings). In Java, there is a 'String' class that is used for strings most of the time, but there is also char[], which would be confusing to many C programmers. It's only familiarity and ubiquity that make this choice 'obvious' for most devs > In that regard I still find it extremely puzzling that some languages / runtimes still struggle with only giving you two choices: byte arrays and UTF-8 strings. To be clear, Haskell's strings and Text are not UTF-8. Thy are containers that can hold any unicode character, but the particular way in which they're stored is not really guaranteed. I believe Text is UTF-16 internally, and String, being based on Char, uses full UTF-32.