Comment by stouset

> The problem with string length is there's probably at least four concepts that could conceivably be called length.

The answer here isn't to throw up your hands, pick one, and other cases be damned. It's to expose them all and let the engineer choose. To not beat the dead horse of Rust, I'll point that Ruby gets this right too.

    * String#length                   # count Unicode code units
    * String#bytes#length             # count bytes
    * String#grapheme_clusters#length # count grapheme clusters

Similarly, each of those "views" lets you slice, index, etc. across those concepts naturally. Golang's string is the worst of them all. They're nominally UTF-8, but nothing actually enforces it. But really they're just buckets of bytes, unless you send them to APIs that silently require them to be UTF-8 and drop them on the floor or misbehave if they're not.

Height/width to display is font-dependent, so can't just be on a "string" but needs an object with additional context.