But back then we had less memory, and Java was never that memory efficient to begin with. I wouldn't say double-digit memory savings are in the realm of overly pedantic micro optimisations.

One language whose name escapes me took an approach where the internal representation is always unicode codepoints, and Strings have methods for projecting those .toUTF8() or whatever to interact with the outside world - I liked that a lot due to its simplicity, anyone knows which language that was?