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UTF-16 will be quite the mountain as Windows APIs and web specifications/engines default to it for historical reasons.

• int_19h 1y ago
  It's not just Windows and JavaScript. On Apple platforms, NSString is UTF-16. On Linux, Qt uses UTF-16 strings. Looking at languages, we have Java (which is where JS got this bug from) and C# both enshrining it in their respective language specs. So it's far more pervasive than people think, and will likely be in the picture for decades to come.
  • electroly 1y ago
    ICU (International Components for Unicode, the library published by the Unicode folks) itself uses UTF-16 internally, and most of these things are built on ICU. I agree strongly with your conclusion--UTF-16 isn't going anywhere. I don't think the ICU people are even talking about changing the internals to UTF-8.
  • account42 1y ago
    Qt could really change if they wanted to and really should have by now - it's not like they keep long-term backwards compatibility anyway unlike the others that you mentioned. Of course they chose to integrate JavaScript so that's less likely now.