Has Swift improved their text handling? Last time I looked, it took way too many lines of code and temporary variables just to extract a substring range from a string. Their convoluted idea that a string can't be directly sliced with integer indexes–by bytes, let alone by Unicode code points or graphemes–was so frustrating I swore I would never look in Swift's general direction again. It was such a joke just to try to extract x UTF-8 characters starting from position y. I liked the overall feel of the language, but the fact I ran into such a horrible wall trying to perform the most basic of string manipulations was unforgivable.

Swift came out at a time where UTF-8 was already the standard. They talked a lot of talk about grapheme clusters being the most accurate representation, and then failed to deliver a coherent API to back it up. Any chance that has changed?