> It uses byte strings instead of UTF-8 strings. In my opinion, that’s not an optimization, that’s changing the problem. Depending on the question you’re asking

> It uses byte strings instead of UTF-8 strings. In my opinion, that’s not an optimization, that’s changing the problem. Depending on the question you’re asking, only one of the two can be correct. No, that's very wrong. ripgrep has rich Unicode support for example, but represents file contents as byte strings. UTF-8 strings vs byte strings is an implementation detail. I think you might benefit from reading the "bonus" Rust submission: https://github.com/benhoyt/countwords/blob/8553c8f600c40a4626e966bc7e7e804097e6e2f4/rust/bonus/main.rs https://github.com/benhoyt/countwords/blob/8553c8f600c40a462... IMO, Ben kind of glossed over the bonus submission. But I personally think it was the biggest point in favor of Rust for a real world version of this task.