Perl XS libraries often provide a full object oriented wrapper around the native C calls. They always have, at a minimum, a thin perl wrapper function. There's

Perl XS libraries often provide a full object oriented wrapper around the native C calls. They always have, at a minimum, a thin perl wrapper function. There's plenty of scope for the encoding to be done automatically, but the current state is that it's not even done manually by the libraries. Haskell's equivilant FFI interfaces do encoding conversions, so that if they return a String, it's a sequence of unicode code points, as the Haskell standard requires. Those that return raw data will use an appropriate ByteString type. Haskell didn't used to do encoding conversions for FilePaths in the FFI, but this has been fixed in version 7.4, and is even done in a way that doesn't require unix filenames be utf-8 encoded -- other encodings will pass through unchanged.