See, this is the difference between a productive engineer and a purist.

You are a productive engineer. You see a fast library that needs a different encoding, so your first thought is to add a transcoding step and make a 2x gain in a short timeframe.

I am a purist. I see a fast library that needs a different encoding, and my first thought is “ok, I’ll fork that library and make it work with UTF-16 natively”. 24 months later I’ll be found, bearded down to my kneecaps, staring at the bottom of a bottle of scotch, mumbling a mixture of curse words and “PowerPC”. But Id get a 2.05x speedup eventually, so…