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We have an http://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/std/ffi/struct.OsString.html to abstract over a native string in whatever encoding your platform has. Generally, things that interact with the OS use these, and they can convert to a UTF-8 String.

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Suppose I'm on Linux, but I want to interact with Windows stuff. (CIFS protocol, NTFS on-disk format, disassembler for Windows executables, Wine-like program, cross-compiler, etc.)

I'll be wanting UTF-16 support. Going the other way matters too; if I'm on Windows I may need UCS-32 support.

Sure. That's not a problem. You can write any kind of string type you want, as a library, and convert between them. One of the nice things about Rust is that it's low-level enough that almost everything is a library anyway, so the language won't get in your way if you need SomeNicheString.

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