[Haskell-cafe] Re: String vs ByteString

[Yitzchak Gale]

Ketil Malde wrote:
> I'd point out that it seems at least as unfair to optimize for CJK at
> the cost of Western languages.

Quite true.

> [...speculative calculation from which we conclude that]
> a given document translated
> between Chinese and English should occupy roughly the same space in
> UTF-8, but be 2.5 times longer in English for UTF-16.

Could be. We really need data on that.

If it's practical to maintain different backends with identical public APIs
and different internal encodings, that would be the best. After a
few years of widespread usage, would know a lot more.

Regards,
Yitz