I need utf8, very much so! I’m using LuaJIT with Awesome window manager. My native language has all those pesky ąść characters, so for example, when I trim the length of a window title without utf8 support, it often looks bad (ie. sometimes characters encoded as more than 1 byte are sliced in half, resulting in junk being displayed).
I’m generally happy with my setup, Haxe and LuaJIT combo seems to work quite well, but I’m still trying to get a feel of how to best code in that environment. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem popular as a Haxe target, and there are many rough edges (like in this thread: Macro to generate nested Lua tables from typedef), so for the moment, I’m trying first to make the development convenient, and plan to worry about performance later. The biggest problem I currently have is the “declarative layout” system that exploits the dual nature of Lua tables to describe widget hierarchies: Topic 03-declarative-layout.md - awesome API documentation No matter what I do, it doesn’t look nearly as nice in Haxe (yet) 