Yes, the variable length nature of UTF-8 generally means more hard-to-predict branches. But sufficiently clever programmers can find ways around that, see Lemir

Yes, the variable length nature of UTF-8 generally means more hard-to-predict branches. But sufficiently clever programmers can find ways around that, see Lemire's work on using SIMD to validate UTF-8 very quickly: https://lemire.me/blog/2018/05/16/validating-utf-8-strings-using-as-little-as-0-7-cycles-per-byte/ https://lemire.me/blog/2018/05/16/validating-utf-8-strings-u...