> In UTF-8, most of those languages require 3 bytes to encode a 32-bit codepoint, in UTF-16 they only ever need 2. This ends up being a huge savings. Meanwhile

> In UTF-8, most of those languages require 3 bytes to encode a 32-bit codepoint, in UTF-16 they only ever need 2. This ends up being a huge savings. Meanwhile in lots of other countries, UTF-8 lets you use 1 byte to store each character instead of 2; which is also a huge savings. The question is, is it better for the world to pick one encoding and have all programs use it, or pick several encodings and switch between them depending on the context / country? Picking one encoding means we can reuse our code more easily. Picking multiple encodings means we get slightly smaller file sizes. For my money, the best approach is to use UTF-8 everywhere. This lets us reuse code. Then if you're worried about file size on disk or over the wire, compress your text content with LZ4 or snappy or something. That'll halve the size of text for everyone and LZ4 is so fast its essentially free from a computational standpoint. As this blog post demonstrates, quite a lot of code needs to deeply understand text encoding to work (be that UTF-8 or UTF-16 or whatever). Its a big savings in programming hours if we only have to write this code once.