UTF-8 is now Everywhere
2025-05-11
Around 2010 had reason to look at UTF-8. Became convinced there was no reason to use anything else.
- The original design of UTF-8 was minimal and elegant (from Rob Pike and Ken Thompson).
- Could re-use the existing C string libraries, with a small care.
- Was less trouble than Unicode.
Admittedly, I am an American, and have little use for languages other than English. Still, I made some attempt to at least minimally support other languages in my software. In the 1990s that meant supporting Unicode - in Windows and Java, mostly. This was ... somewhat awkward.
(There is more than enough written on the topic on the web.)
When playing with Tim Bray's Wide Finder challenge, was surprised to find inefficient Java's stock UTF-8 conversion. So walked through the (simple) conversion and wrote my own. After, I could not see reason to use anything else.
Roll forward to the present, and seems a few other folk have come to the same end.