In Go, one symbol is called a rune. A string is a string, but when I try to manipulate it, it turns into an array of bytes, not an array of runes. I then have to deal with this crap.
Can you suggest some mental gymnastics to justify this behavior to people who use real programming languages?

I don't know Go, but

- arrays are evenly spaced in low level languages for O(1) indexing
- strings are Unicode in modern languages
- strings are more compact than an array of their code points, because they're understood to consist overwhelmingly of low values, and also represent most of a program's memory usage.

Rust doesn't represent strings as character arrays either.

Go is definitely overhyped. But JS doesn‘t treat utf8 strings correctly, either. To be fair, most languages don‘t do it right. The only language that I know which handles strings correctly is Swift.

For example most languages will report a simple "🤡" string as length 4. and when you try to access the first character you get something wrong, not the original emoji.

Handling strings correctly is a very, very complex and complicated topic. I heard a talk about that. One but not the only problem is that utf8 characters (or what we intuitively think of as characters) can have variable size/length.
Most languages are too old or too lazy (Go?) to make it right.

@Lensflare Elixir also handles graphemes, and Rust has a very popular crate for this purpose. The problem is that unlike codepoints, with graphemes you can't take the first grapheme from a byte stream without lookahead, because any valid grapheme can also be the first half of a combination using an infix ZWJ, and indeed the most common way to denote some Arabic letters uses an infix ZWJ.

Go, another language that came too late and is just not better than it's parents.

I've heard / read that a go executable is just your source compiled in a go interpreter binary. Not even efi, not native.

We should've stopped by python. Python had a huge performsnce recently