JuliaLang/julia — comment on commit 6613162ba3219c8540ce9f94ae71f3074c012912
File: j/string.j line 234
By StefanKarpinski:

Agreed. For ASCII strings we should possibly just return a new string whose data has been copied in the reverse order and likewise for UTF-8, we can do reverse encoding relatively simply. This is just a generic implementation that will work for any kind of string. Also, see 3f1d1afa6840f65fadfea5459ac20cb974bf0395 for a fix to your specific problem :-)