> [...] when it comes to text processing simplicity and robustness beats other concerns. It's unclear if UTF-32 beats UTF-8 there however [...] I always wonder

> [...] when it comes to text processing simplicity and robustness beats other concerns. It's unclear if UTF-32 beats UTF-8 there however [...] I always wondered how this affected simplicity and efficiency of different text editor implementation strategies. I'm mainly thinking about the variable byte lengths and how it affects anything related to character indices. I'm guessing if it seriously hinders a preferred strategy one would just convert to a plain codepoint of fixed word size internally at the cost of greater memory usage... which actually is not that bad if you only want to support the BMP without any fancy encoding which would only takes up 2 bytes internally.