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0 pointspeterfirefly9mo ago0 comments

UTF-16 is a hack that was invented when it became clear that UCS-2 wasn't gonna work (65536 codepoints was not enough for everybody).

Almost the entire world could have ignored it if not for Microsoft making the wrong choice with Windows NT and then stubbornly insisting that their wrong choice was indeed correct for a couple of decades.

There was a long phase where some parts of Windows understood (and maybe generated) UTF-16 and others only UCS-2.

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kccqzy9mo ago

Besides Microsoft, plenty of others thought UTF-16 to be a good idea. The Haskell Text type used to be based on UTF-16; it only switched to UTF-8 a few years ago. Java still uses UTF-16, but with an ad hoc optimization called CompactStrings to use ISO-8859-1 where possible.

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Andrex9mo ago

Thank you! That's interesting.

What about UTF-7? That seemed like a bad idea even at the time.

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