Could we all agree to not use the word "unicode" when talking about encoding (ie. how code points are serialized to bytes)? Unicode (ie. the standard set forth by the unicode consortium) has nothing to say about encoding.

I think what you mean is "Go's 'everything is a UTF-8 string' approach", but I'm not familiar enough with Go's internal encoding to know.

For instance, you mention "Don't handle the decode errors", but I can only assume by that you mean UTF-8's decode errors, since UTF-8 has the possibility of having encoding errors, where things like UTF-32 do not. They're both Unicode encodings, so it makes no sense to say it's "Unicode"'s decode errors.

I think the author of this article falls into the same trap all over the place. He uses the word "Unicode" to refer to an encoding all over the place. Until he is able to distinguish the difference between the Unicode standard and all its various encoding methods, there's not much point in reading his article.

(And no, Microsoft's braindead decision to use the word "Unicode" to mean "UCS-2", and later ret-conning it to mean "UTF-16", doesn't count. Don't perpetuate the stupid.)