Treating UTF-8 as a different and optional view on a type-agnostic bag of bytes is a feature, not a bug ;) (just look at the mess that Python3 made of that topic) Most of the time, data is just passed around without looking at or caring about its content, and for that it doesn't matter if the data is binary bytes, ascii, code-page encoded, shift-jis, utf-8 or any other format, it only matters at the endpoint when "opening the box". UTF-8 encoding/decoding/validation is handled by the stdlib in Zig, not by the language.