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I wish he had been a bit more explicit there, TBH. What's better about Go strings?

Skimming over a post from a quick search [0], it looks like Go strictly uses byte strings and manipulates them with various keywords and functions. No encoding/decoding between byte strings (and picking an encoding) and unicode strings like in python.

[0] https://blog.golang.org/strings

I think that’s not really the right way to put it. Rather, go offers UTF-8 strings and byte slices, with a simple typecast in either way, with various keywords and functions to DTRT to each. One still must worry about encoding & decoding if one doesn’t want UTF-8, and one must worry about invalid UTF-8 in a byte slice when casting, but in general Go does what one would expect with a minimum of fuss.

Go strings are just a sequence of bytes in no particular encoding, i.e they can contain arbitrary data. Converting strings to byte slices and vice versa works always without ever changing a single bit.

He wrote about this more detail in an earlier blog post (about halfway down the page).

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8161

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