[winter_squirrel]

It saddens me that a proper string type is a hill the zig folks are willing to die on. The language would have _felt_ a lot better if they would have (at least) just copied what rust did with strings.

I understand the argument that in most situations a byte array might be what you actually want, but in practice it feels very dirty to be passing byte arrays around instead of expressing the underlying meaning of that byte array as a type (in this instance a String type).

Having a string type also makes any standard library functions on strings infinitely easier to discover.