Unicode is the de-facto standard encoding for text nowadays. As such, Clasp must support it in order to be able to run a lot of useful software. As an initial suggestion, using UTF-32 internally for string would be a good choice since it will fit the entirety of Unicode into a single character and thus allow constant time access on strings. The size should not be a problem on modern systems. For external formats, UTF-8 and UTF-16 support should also be added.

Since Clasp's main purpose is interaction with C++ libraries, a variety of support functions and mechanisms might have to be added to ease the conversion and sharing of string data between Clasp and external or bound libraries. This might necessitate supporting different string representation formats internally to allow relatively efficient handling of strings without having to rely on conversion every time the Clasp/Library boundary is overstepped.