Okay, perhaps a more detailed breakdown of the false claims will help, so that nobody is misled by revisionist/apologist history. > Unicode was assumed to be 6

Okay, perhaps a more detailed breakdown of the false claims will help, so that nobody is misled by revisionist/apologist history. > Unicode was assumed to be 64k of codepoints Not in 2002, when MySQL restricted their utf8 to three bytes [1]. Before 1997, Unicode specified clearly that 21 bits was the limit [2]. By 2002, there were 94,205 characters, including CJK characters beyond the 16 bit range, and clearly more to come. [3] > so a 3-byte UTF-8 sequence was considered "long enough" Not by many. The MySQL developers chose very badly, here. I and plenty of other developers managed to implement UTF-8 more correctly around that time. It wasn't hard, as the specs are very straightforward. > especially since there were surrogate pairs for the rare cases where you have to encode higher code points Surrogate pairs have never been supported in UTF-8. The RFCs are explicit about that. [4] [5] (search for D800) Maybe you're thinking of CESU-8, though that's not intended for interchange. [6] > Only "recently" have longer UTF-8 sequences (aka. emojis) become widespread enough that this became a problem. Not supporting Unicode properly has always been problematic; it's just that bug reports from affected users rarely reached the right people. Emojis have done the world a favour in making less competent developers actually notice their bugs in basic text handling. > Yes, it could have been avoided And was, by most developers. > they probably just wanted to optimize a bit. They apparently altered a config number [1], so it wasn't an optimization decision; the code at the time still had support for 6-byte utf8 [7]. I would guess that they found a bug in their support for longer utf-8 sequences/conversion and took the hacky way out. [1] https://github.com/mysql/mysql-server/commit/43a506c0ced0e6ea101d3ab8b4b423ce3fa327d0 https://github.com/mysql/mysql-server/commit/43a506c0ced0e6e... [2] https://unicode.org/faq/utf_bom.html https://unicode.org/faq/utf_bom.html [3] https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Unicode/Versions https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Unicode/Versions [4] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2044 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2044 [5] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3629 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3629 [6] https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr26/tr26-4.html https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr26/tr26-4.html [7] https://github.com/mysql/mysql-server/blob/43a506c0ced0e6ea101d3ab8b4b423ce3fa327d0/strings/ctype-utf8.c https://github.com/mysql/mysql-server/blob/43a506c0ced0e6ea1...