@cwebber @gaditb @bremner @aparrish (i am dubious that you can have both “a small team could reasonably re-implement the language from the standard” and “strings are unicode”. a small team CANNOT reasonably re·implement the unicode standard. language is complex and requires a team of specialists to properly handle. you can outsource this work to ICU, but that means either shipping ICU in your binaries or giving up on easy crossplatform compatibility. and that would still be “a small team could easily re·implement except this one core part”. sorry)