Yeah I think that's a different time and a different place. At least the GNU Unix tooling can all be configured in the UTF-8 locale, which I think is pretty sta

Yeah I think that's a different time and a different place. At least the GNU Unix tooling can all be configured in the UTF-8 locale, which I think is pretty standard these days. So I guess from my view, Unix tooling isn't quite "it's all just bytes" these days, but rather, "everything is UTF-8, except for some things and we still want to handle those things in some sensible way." I don't think the byte-string-mostly-UTF-8 approach leads to the sadness you describe. What you describe I think was a result of a very different time before the ubiquity of UTF-8. I might have a very different opinion if we were transported back in time, absolutely. Go has the same byte-string-mostly-UTF-8 approach as bstr (and indeed, bstr was inspired by it), and I don't think they're having the kinds of problems you describe. Go strings might not be valid UTF-8, but the language itself pushes you toward UTF-8 and they otherwise have very good Unicode support throughout their standard library and supporting libraries.