Yes it is.  Every conversion to and from the unicode type and every expansion of the unicode type from 1 to 2 to 4 bytes eats up processor time, cache&#x2F;memory bandwidth and puts more pressure on the garbage collector.<p>And I don&#x27;t want to be forced to distinguish between strings and bytes.  To me they are one and the same as I use UTF-8 for everything.  Not once in my code do I need to encode&#x2F;decode anything.