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.