That is something I’d like to see but I don’t want to wade into the already very complicated discussion around arrow strings in pandas. If a Pandas developer wanted to take this on I think that would make things easier since there’s so much complexity around strings in Pandas.

That said there is a branch that gets most of the way there: https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas/pull/58578. The remaining challenges are mostly around getting consensus around how to introduce this change.

If NumPy had StringDType in 2019 instead of 2024 I think Pandas might have had an easier time. Sadly the timing didn’t quite work out.