Before we get serious usage on Mangle, it is important to tackle the issues of strings and encodings.
When strings are textual data, it is advantageous to have a known, fixed encoding (and that encoding is UTF8).
For anything that is not UTF8 text, one can then use a dedicate byte sequence type.
This has some implications for literals, the output of String(), debug output and serialization, but all these issues already exist and have a /bytes type actually makes tackling these simpler.
Before we get serious usage on Mangle, it is important to tackle the issues of strings and encodings.
When strings are textual data, it is advantageous to have a known, fixed encoding (and that encoding is UTF8). For anything that is not UTF8 text, one can then use a dedicate byte sequence type.
This has some implications for literals, the output of String(), debug output and serialization, but all these issues already exist and have a /bytes type actually makes tackling these simpler.