[Haskell-cafe] Re: PROPOSAL: New efficient Unicode string library.

[Twan van Laarhoven]

Lots of people wrote:
 > I want a UTF-8 bikeshed!
 > No, I want a UTF-16 bikeshed!

What the heck does it matter what encoding the library uses internally? 
I expect the interface to be something like (from my own CompactString 
library):
 > fromByteString :: Encoding -> ByteString -> UnicodeString
 > toByteString   :: Encoding -> UnicodeString -> ByteString
The only matter is efficiency for a particular encoding.

I would suggest that we get a working library first. Either UTF-8 or 
UTF-16 will do, as long as it works.

Even better would be to implement both (and perhaps more encodings), and 
then benchmark them to get a sensible default. Then the choice can be 
made available to the user as well, in case someone has specifix needs. 
But again: get it working first!

Twan