Comment by dcode

Allow me to focus on the technical arguments, that I think fall short. Sure, one can go and make a second string type, or a bunch of throwing APIs. I'd question that this actually improves a language in a tangible way, or that anyone would want that for a rational reason that is not induced from the outside. When not doing so, it's incompatible in the sense of the word. Whether incompatibility isn't much of a deal depends, I guess. For someone not having a respective use case, perhaps, but for someone else having exactly that use case, say hashing substrings to then discover unexpected collisions, or streaming 1K chunks of strings over component boundaries, then discovering mojibake after concatenating, it might very well be significant, or even expensive. I mean, there are good reasons all those languages try the best they can to prevent that in their native habitats. What amazes me is that all that came to be because someone has formulated a desire, that could easily be fulfilled in addition with a boolean flag for W/UTF, but refuses to include such a trivial compromise, which surprisingly has more weight than any evidence, or precedents like WebIDL, JSON, or the various language standards. I find this highly concerning, since it conflicts with my understanding of responsible engineering. Also conflicts with Wasm's communication, that literally states that Wasm executes in the same semantic universe as JavaScript, and maintains backwards-compatibility with the Web. Perhaps, if there is something fruitful to spin a narrative around, then that these decisions undermine the exact value proposition of AssemblyScript, that was supposed to be used in tandem/closely with JavaScript, which now becomes risky on the fundamental level of the most prominent higher-level data type, strings. Plus, of course, when two AssemblyScript components communicate. That makes these string decisions particularly unfortunate for me personally after having spent all that time and effort, working towards Wasm's goals in good faith, perhaps explaining my persistence on the matter. Quite a dilemma.