[bsder]

Nope. It's not at all fixed because nobody can ever agree on what a "String" is and what performance guarantees the underlying data structure should provide.

Let's just assume a String is UTF-8 to make things "simple".

Is a String mutable or not? Should mutable and immutable Strings have the same underlying structure? If mutable, is a String extensible or not? Can a String be sliced into another String? Can those slices be shared? Should you walk across codepoints or characters (which could be multiple codepoints due to combining)? If you want to insert a codepoint in the middle of a String, what are the performance guarantees?

I can go on and on ...

"String" really has to be a library as there are simply far too many permutations once you step away from "Shove ASCII to tty".

[DinaCoder98]

Well sure, people may colloquially refer to a lot of things as "strings"—hell, you could refer to all sequences as strings if you just wanted to argue with people—but the idea of trying to encapsulate this all in the standard library in a single implementation seems confusing semantically and of questionable value. It seems a lot easier to work with a reasonable interpretation of a string with its associated tradeoffs—which again is implied by most standard libraries.

That said, I personally would balk at willing adopting any runtime that didn't enable iterating over a sequence of unicode code points, whether they be stored as utf8 or some 16-bit form, from a string of bytes in 2024 unless I were guaranteed to avoid having to deal with text processing of free-form human input.