Article is about setting up locale during compilation/runtime. Internally java/jvm uses only UTF-16 and it is not going to change because of backward compatibil

Article is about setting up locale during compilation/runtime. Internally java/jvm uses only UTF-16 and it is not going to change because of backward compatibility reasons. Char is a 16bit type, so some unicode 'characters' have high/low surrogate pairs, those pairs are encoded in 32bit int as `codePoint`. Example of a problem: String#length returns number of chars, not number of codepoints. String/Character api is a one big record of utf16 madness: http://grepcode.com/file/repository.grepcode.com/java/root/jdk/openjdk/8u40-b25/java/lang/String.java#736 http://grepcode.com/file/repository.grepcode.com/java/root/j... http://grepcode.com/file/repository.grepcode.com/java/root/jdk/openjdk/8u40-b25/java/lang/Character.java#5180 http://grepcode.com/file/repository.grepcode.com/java/root/j... Most of contemporary technologies use UTF8 for string encoding and exchange format. This back and forth UTF8<>UTF16 conversion in java doesn't come without a computational&memory price.