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Unicode support is cheap memory wise. The expensive thing if having the fonts. The fonts can live on the hard drive until actually needed. I suspect the issue

Unicode support is cheap memory wise. The expensive thing if having the fonts. The fonts can live on the hard drive until actually needed. I suspect the issue is more of the runtime overhead of supporting it over the entire stack. That's a bigger cost that people would only want to pay if they were actually going to use it. So then you're in the situation of having to support unicode and non unicode versions of everything.

ivan_gammel 3y ago
Most programs written in Pascal were UI programs (even in client-server model client was typically a specialized program, not browser), so rendering a string would indeed require a font file. You could pre-render and cache in RAM some frequently used glyphs (locale-specific alphabet, digits etc), but hitting HDD every time to render an emoji won’t be fast enough. Modern Unicode was simply not feasible.
- zozbot234 3y ago
  HDD and memory sizes were growing very fast back then. So it would've been feasible even on fairly low-end hardware, starting from the mid-1990s or so. If you could have "multimedia" or "DTP" software on such PC's, modern fonts ought to have been possible. The flip side is that old computers became obsolete very quickly back then, a few years were enough for very real generational changes.
  - ivan_gammel 3y ago
    Low-end hardware in 1995 was something like i386 with 1 Mb RAM, meaning that just a modern Unicode font would consume most of the memory available to a program, probably leaving no enough space for the rendering code (which is not small by standards of that time). In 2nd half of 1990s I still maintained a classroom with 15 IBM PC XTs, which were still doing their jobs (our most modern hardware were Pentiums with 16 Mb RAM IIRC).
    - benj111 3y ago
      >modern Unicode font That isn't unicode though. That's a font. You can have bitmap unicode fonts if you want. Let's put it this way. Say you have a unicode aware library and only ever use the ASCII compatible codes. You aren't using more space for fonts. If you want to read a Chinese document, yes you would need to then install Chinese fonts. That would take space yes. But it's possible. If you only speak Chinese that's something you have to deal with. Could you have a font for every unicode point at the same time, probably not, but most people don't need to read most code points most of the time.
- benj111 3y ago
  If you use an emoji load it into ram then. You aren't (generally) going to be using Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Sanskrit, ancient Egyptian and emoji all in one document on one screen. If you're using Japanese load the Japanese font, if Chinese, use the Chinese font.

ivan_gammel 3y ago

Most programs written in Pascal were UI programs (even in client-server model client was typically a specialized program, not browser), so rendering a string would indeed require a font file. You could pre-render and cache in RAM some frequently used glyphs (locale-specific alphabet, digits etc), but hitting HDD every time to render an emoji won’t be fast enough. Modern Unicode was simply not feasible.

zozbot234 3y ago
HDD and memory sizes were growing very fast back then. So it would've been feasible even on fairly low-end hardware, starting from the mid-1990s or so. If you could have "multimedia" or "DTP" software on such PC's, modern fonts ought to have been possible. The flip side is that old computers became obsolete very quickly back then, a few years were enough for very real generational changes.
- ivan_gammel 3y ago
  Low-end hardware in 1995 was something like i386 with 1 Mb RAM, meaning that just a modern Unicode font would consume most of the memory available to a program, probably leaving no enough space for the rendering code (which is not small by standards of that time). In 2nd half of 1990s I still maintained a classroom with 15 IBM PC XTs, which were still doing their jobs (our most modern hardware were Pentiums with 16 Mb RAM IIRC).
  - benj111 3y ago
    >modern Unicode font That isn't unicode though. That's a font. You can have bitmap unicode fonts if you want. Let's put it this way. Say you have a unicode aware library and only ever use the ASCII compatible codes. You aren't using more space for fonts. If you want to read a Chinese document, yes you would need to then install Chinese fonts. That would take space yes. But it's possible. If you only speak Chinese that's something you have to deal with. Could you have a font for every unicode point at the same time, probably not, but most people don't need to read most code points most of the time.
benj111 3y ago
If you use an emoji load it into ram then. You aren't (generally) going to be using Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Sanskrit, ancient Egyptian and emoji all in one document on one screen. If you're using Japanese load the Japanese font, if Chinese, use the Chinese font.