3 ms·
Not really if you can make a good living writing software for only the US/UK, France, Germany, Italy and a few more Western European countries, which is perfect
by gpvos 8y ago
Not really if you can make a good living writing software for only the US/UK, France, Germany, Italy and a few more Western European countries, which is perfectly feasible. Latin1 works perfectly fine there, and if you wanted, and you didn't have to interact too much with other systems, you could just completely ignore all other encodings until UTF-8 started to get traction in the later 1990s. It even got into many RFCs as the default encoding until the RFC editors started to enforce everyone to implement UTF-8 and default to it.
- Piskvorrr 8y agoOh, you could have done that in 1990s and well into the aughts, no doubt about that - that's exactly what happened :) I thought you proposed Latin-1 as useful today.
- gpvos 8y agoOh no, no way. I'm not 100% sure about bradleyjg though... Maybe I misunderstood them.
- bradleyjg 8y agoI think Latin-1 compatible strings are common enough to be worth optimizing for with separate code paths. At least in large projects like OSes and programming languages. That doesn’t mean I think Unicode support should be omitted.
- gpvos 8y agoIn such cases I would think the optimization is basically for ASCII, and then extend that to Latin1 because it happens to be the first 256 characters of Unicode, which means processing is trivial and you don't waste the other 128 byte values that way. But I figure that 99.9% of those strings would be ASCII-only.