Obviously you should use whatever language you want on your projects, but in case you’re interested:
> unfortunately, asking rust to treat UTF-8 string as a "ball of bytes" is hard, when it's stupidly easy with C.
String::as_bytes seems pretty easy, and there are byte literals b'?' of type u8 and b"???" of type [u8]. You can avoid interacting with the UTF-8 types at all if you don’t want to.
> Plus, I wanted to use arena-style-allocation where I make huge allocations in one go and then don't think about memory, something that I don't have control over in Rust.
Perhaps the bumpalo and typed-arena crates would interest you.