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Why isn't UTF-32 used everywhere for everything? Is an extra 3 bytes per character really that much?
by ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
Why isn't UTF-32 used everywhere for everything? Is an extra 3 bytes per character really that much?
- aaaaaaaaaaab 4y agoBecause combining characters would still be a problem in UTTF-32.
- Groxx 4y ago^ yeah, this is pretty much the answer. 32 bits is not sufficient, emoji and combining characters go further. Even with UTF-32 you still can't treat "one 32 bit sequence" as "one character/grapheme/etc". It solves nothing, but it takes more space in the vast majority of cases.
- wtetzner 4y agoWhat would it buy you? And yes, for text that’s mostly ASCII, you’d be quadrupling memory usage.
- ThrowawayTestr 4y agoRight, memory. I was only thinking of disk space.