https://discourse.haskell.org/t/hf-tech-proposal-1-utf-8-enc...
Fortunately this proposal has been accepted, but I don't know the timeline for its implementation in GHC.
Until then, working with UTF-8 is kind of convoluted
https://serokell.io/blog/haskell-with-utf8
Also: libraries need to be fixed to accept Data.Text instead of String. IsString helps (it's a typeclass that contains all string types) but only if APIs take it instead of defaulting to String. Adding random string conversions to cope with legacy APIs is very annoying.
This work was completed a while ago.
https://hackage.haskell.org/package/text-2.0/changelog
> I don't know the timeline for its implementation in GHC.
Data.Text is a library, not a compiler feature, so completing it was not tied to GHC.
It is really a pain that any beginner in the Haskell language is learning what seems the obvious datatype for strings, i.e. String, and later has to unlearn that again.
The Haskell ecosystem has improved quite a lot in recent years: E.g. there's now Haskell Language Server which provides very nice autocompletion in Editors like VSCode. Very recently support for dot-notation has been added, so you can now write `someValue.someField` as in other languages. In the web dev space we now have IHP, which is Haskell's take of Laravel/Rails/Django https://ihp.digitallyinduced.com/ (Disclaimer: I'm founder of the company that makes IHP)
So if you have checked out Haskell in the past already, you might want to give it another try! :)