> ever going to be an encoding that replaces UTF-8? Or have we hit on some sort of permanent local maxima Our programming languages, type systems and compilers

> ever going to be an encoding that replaces UTF-8? Or have we hit on some sort of permanent local maxima Our programming languages, type systems and compilers, are still extremely poor at specifying the properties of types, and at permitting variant implementations which preserve them. We're still struggling with basics, like memory layout for locality (eg, arrays of structures of arrays). And many languages still can't manage multiple dispatch. As we slowly become less crippled, it eventually becomes straightforward to use alternate representations and encodings. For instance, UTF strings with inline descriptive bitmasks is already a thing, as is substring-local encoding. So it seems we needn't be trapped in a local maxima, at least long-term. And that perhaps the future will eventually be more heterogeneous. Perhaps like integers and floats, there's both diversity collapse (big endian dies, ieee 754), and heterogeneity (integer packing, SIMD).