I could imagine cases where, in very tight memory situations or with very very large literals, we could make use of modifying literals. But I'm not sure this is a significant requirement, or that it couldn't be considered if there is a significant (and rich) use case to fund the development of the slow path.

Pharos does not target classic “resource constraint” embedded scenarios.

(else we would do many things a lot different)

Is there a critic rule catching that sort of thing? That we could run on Squeaksource / Smalltalkhub?

No, as you can hand a reference to a literal over to someone else who does not even know that it is a literal… this dreaded “am I going insane, it’s writing right here” bug where you change a string somewhere that actually is a string literal of some method…

Marcus