Which is something that I'd regard as a major setback. Here in Europe, a solid encoding support is pretty much a must-have for any up-to-date programming language. There's much more than utf-8 and not being able to handle that is a deal-breaker for me.
Leaving aside the fact that encoding support is explicitly a goal, it would be an incredibly daft thing to do to decide that Rubinius was going to take a regressive, all-the-world-is-one-encoding point of view and break compatibility with much existing Ruby code.
