Um, UTF-8, a valid unicode encoding, handles strings with a null terminator just fine. Those who throw stones, should not live in glass houses.

Proper unicode support would include things like normalizing strings (Unicode has 4 different normal forms!) and testing for fuzzy equivalence. But last time I checked, the usual library for doing those things, libicu, was bigger than the whole Lua interpreter. So I can see why there isn't a lot of enthusiasm, especially if there isn't a real use case.

yes, packing icu with every lua distribution or standalone app is bad, and we don't even need to think about OS's Unicode capabilities. So every lang deserves to be suck at unicode handling. Because, you know, ICU is big.