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Java 1.0 was made back in the days when "65K characters would be enough for anyone!" hence they chose UCS-2. Java only supported UTF-16 as of Java 5. I suspect

Java 1.0 was made back in the days when "65K characters would be enough for anyone!" hence they chose UCS-2. Java only supported UTF-16 as of Java 5. I suspect that if they could turn back time, they would have chosen UTF-8 from the get-go, but, as you say, that was a battle lost long ago.

jillesvangurp 8y ago
Java 9 released last year changed the internal string representation to not be UTF-16 anymore Up until then characters took at least 2 bytes in Java. Of course the internal representation and what is written to IO streams are two things. UTF-8 has been supported pretty much from day 1 along with a whole range of legacy encodings that used to be common. Using UTF-8 instead of UTF-16 internally is mostly a memory optimization and does not actually break any apis that I'm aware off (I'm sure there are corner cases, but am not aware of any issues here). Using UTF-16 was always somewhat valid in non western scripts where the most used characters would be represented using two bytes instead of just 1 like for most western scripts. But you are right it was a bit of a regrettable choice. If you consider that, e.g. asians mix western script with their local script, it is a lot less clear cut. Throw things like html in the mix and you are looking at a lot of ascii with bits of asian script here and there.