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Re:Maintain It with Zig by moogly on Wednesday September 08, 2021 @02:58PM (#28461560)
Sure, you're not wrong. For my purposes that'd work, but I'm of the opinion that delegating that to an optional library will make a lot of developers lazy and not even bother thinking about Unicode/i18n/l10n issues at all. I've seen so much code, in a multitude of languages that is oblivious to it, but even if it's reified in a type or even having some form of language support, I guess you can argue that people can still ignore it.
Re:Maintain It with Zig by moogly on Wednesday September 08, 2021 @06:29PM (#28463841)
In addition, I should add there are synergy effects in having the community (and the major libraries) settling on a common way, and you'll only really get that if there is a built-in.

However, if the philosophy here is to be unopinionated and optimize for flexibility over everything else, I feel I can't really fault them for making that choice.

Re:Maintain It with Zig by mikepurvis on Wednesday September 08, 2021 @05:41PM (#28463417)
That was basically the state of affairs with strings in Python 2, and although the transition was awful, I'm really, really appreciative of Python 3 now having clearly-separated str and bytes types.