[drej]

> Go and Rust expose UTF-8 at the byte level. This is something of a headache and may result in invalid string slices. It basically punts the problem back to the user.

There are pros and cons to both approaches. The prime ones being that []byte allows for easy random access, whereas []rune usually takes O(n) to work with (unless you store rune lengths separately, which is memory intensive).

I guess it's about the right level of abstraction, so that you can choose if you're working with bytes (binary I/O, when you know it's ascii etc.) and when with runes (most situations).

I still haven't decided whether I prefer the Python approach or the Go one.