> The backend never needs to do things like figure out how long a string Not as measured by clusters, no. > search for one string in a database of other strin

> The backend never needs to do things like figure out how long a string Not as measured by clusters, no. > search for one string in a database of other strings? Hence I said "normalisation". The frontend already has to do all the unicode twiddling, it may as well normalise the input too.