> waste unicode space The desirability of emoji aside, Unicode has plenty of space for this. The bulk of Unicode code points are CJKV (Chinese, Japanese, Korea

> waste unicode space The desirability of emoji aside, Unicode has plenty of space for this. The bulk of Unicode code points are CJKV (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese ideographs) characters. Compared to that, a few emoji outside of the BMP don't really amount to much. In fact, I am under the impression that the popularity of emoji had an unintended benefit. It seems to have contributed to a much better support of non-BMP¹ Unicode characters across the board. Until the extended emoji set came along, most characters outside of the BMP where fairly specialistic or extremely regional, so bugs didn't show up as fast as they do now. It used to be a tiny miracle of you managed to view a PDF containing non-BMP characters properly, nowadays that is just how things work. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plane_(Unicode)#Basic_Multilingual_Plane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plane_(Unicode)#Basic_Multilin...