What dezgeg said is pretty much spot on, and also I think what you're describing related to "compiling the codepoints down to bytes" is in many ways equivalent to handling the UTF-8.

My opinion is, stated in a way that a TigerBeetler will resonate with ;), is I want to be able to handle radioactive levels of corruption in my inputs, and still parse them without blowing up, and issuing great error messages along the way.