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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

> Infuriating strings lib. Kinda believe the entire language was designed around emojis.

Unicode but yes

I mean emojis specifically. Python or JS strings are designed for unicode chars. Swift made it about grapheme clusters, which are possibly a valid edge case for like Arabic emphasis marks but not something they'd be motivated to center the entire strings behavior around if it weren't for emojis.

Weird part is the Swift way was still annoying even in cases where I wanted to manipulate strings with emojis very often. Had to build some custom pre-indexed string (just an array of 1-cluster Swift strings), cause find/replace/split/etc was too cumbersome and inefficient otherwise.

I think Swift made the right choice, though: it’s rare that you’d want to slice a grapheme. Usually you don’t have to build an index if you take a step back and design the algorithm around the indexing model.

That's the thing, there is no indexing model. Every string operation is an O(N) seek. But even if you don't care about performance, it's just cumbersome.

Looking at the SO questions for simple things like finding the position of a substring, it also lacked a lot of typical built ins until Swift 5. But that was like 5 years after GA.

There's definitely an indexing model, it's just that it's similar to that of a linked list. You can do all sorts of useful operations on a linked list. Not everything is O(n) in this world.

You can't do any linked list operations on this other than "get next" which is still kinda different

Maybe it would be helpful if you have an example that you’re having trouble with.

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