Comment by Someone

> Go strings are just arrays of bytes,

https://go.dev/ref/spec#String_types: “A string value is a (possibly empty) sequence of bytes”

https://pkg.go.dev/strings@go1.26.2: “Package strings implements simple functions to manipulate UTF-8 encoded strings.”

So, yes, Go strings are just arrays of bytes in the language, but in the standard library, they’re supposed to be UTF-8 (the documentation isn’t immediately clear on how it handles non-UTF-8 strings).

I think this may be why the OP thinks the Go approach is “every path is a valid UTF-8 string”