[tialaramex]

If the language explicitly says how strings are defined, libraries that go "Eh, I'll just shove nonsense bytes in this data structure and claim that's a string" are broken by definition.

That's just as true in Java as in Rust. The problem is languages like C++ or D which just don't care and have a "string" type that might just be some bytes.

[tyingq]

I don't mean libraries, I mean external services. Ambiguous strings are everywhere.

[Arnavion]

The libraries in question are the ones consuming the output of those external services. If an external service sends data that does not map to the programming language's string type, then the string type will fail to be created from that invalid input, and the library was wrong to have tried.

[tyingq]

The external services are not always either explicit, or compliant about the content of said string. Follow this comment chain up, and you'll see mention of blinding casting to utf-8. The point I was making is that you don't always know what the encoding is.

[Arnavion]

If the service doesn't send you back a string it doesn't send you back a string. End of story. You're continuously trying to complicate the issue by insisting that they're sending strings and that the client needs to guess their encoding. They are not and it does not.

[tyingq]

Encoding was one example. But "string" is language dependent aside from encoding. Strong typing doesn't solve the inherent issue.

[teddyh]

Strong typing never “solved” anything, except that is forces you to see the problem and solve it yourself, explicitly, instead of relying on weak typing to fudge the types for you.