I&#x27;m talking about using UTF-8 as the string representation, not UChars. UChars are an artifact of UTF-16, and thus require converting all text on input and output, unless you work in a Windows API world where I&#x2F;O is UTF-16.<p>Modern programming languages such as Rust gain efficiency by working with unmodified UTF-8. All you lose is constant-time arbitrary indexing, which is a bad idea in most cases anyway.