(author here) You are absolutely right! If your use case demands storage of CJK strings, UTF-8 is probably not your best bet. But our data (mostly stringly ty

(author here) You are absolutely right! If your use case demands storage of CJK strings, UTF-8 is probably not your best bet. But our data (mostly stringly typed, think product descriptions or links) is >99% Basic Latin characters and we are getting to a point where memory is actually becoming an issue. So it's neat that Haskell allows us to "upgrade" to UTF-8. With the data being in memory I think compression would not be very helpful either. Edit: I also kind of agree that UTF-16 gets to much hate :D