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Yeah, looking at it, it's probably not a thing for them. I thought something like:

```python

implement something like

strs = nc.createVariable('strs', str, ('strs_dim',))

objs = nc.createVariable('objs', object, ('objs_dim',)) ```

But I see that the str datatype is a netCDF spec type.

Sure, there's no harm in asking. My guess is that this isn't a good fit, but I'm not entirely sure.

I would certainly be interested in giving this a try, although I'm not exactly sure what would go where yet. It seems like this might possibly be something that would be more appropriate in the netCDF4-python library - should I start an issue over there?

I would be OK with this if it required explicitly setting a keyword argument, e.g., ds.to_netcdf(..., allow_pickle=True) and xarray.open_dataset(..., allow_pickle=True). This could be hooked into xarray's existing coding/decoding layer in a relatively straightforward fashion: see ensure_dtype_not_object for where this is caught in the current code. (We would also need something at a lower level in the netCDF4 specific reader/writer to handle uint8 VLType.)