Unicode is a big thing in R16 and R17 where more of the system will use the unicode support we do have. Erlang modules will use utf-8 encoding and so on.

As for a built-in bstring() type, it is being discussed, but there are other things more important to get into the language, maps for instance. Erlang is rather conservative in the speed with which we add stuff to the language.

Erlang has some of the fastest I/O in a runtime. But it is not easy to use correctly. The same goes for string processing. Erlang can be blinding fast at that, but you must understand how to make it fast.