We have seen a lot of effort of better integrating Text into Haskell programming. The only purpose of doing so is to replace String by something more space and time efficient. What would happen if we invest equally much time into making String as efficient as Text? At ICFP 2019 I attended a talk about Gibbon: https://github.com/iu-parfunc/gibbon The idea of the project is to serialize (Haskell's) tree data structures in memory as much as possible. Wouldn't this enable us to use String instead of Text, again, maybe even lists instead of Vectors? No more Text integration efforts, no more external library with GHC-specific manual optimizations. Unfortunately, the project is still in an early stage. So far, it only supports strict data structures. What if we would not complicate the language and generalize syntactic sugar for Text, but instead improve data layout for all Haskell types and eventually make a custom Text type unnecessary?