Yes, UTF-16 is the worst of all alternatives and should be abolished rather sooner than later. UTF-32 is fixed-width for UNICODE code points, but a single visu

Yes, UTF-16 is the worst of all alternatives and should be abolished rather sooner than later. UTF-32 is fixed-width for UNICODE code points, but a single visual character (e.g. a "grapheme cluster") can be built from multiple code points. This is separate from the encoding algorithm though, grapheme clusters are mostly a problem for the high level code working with already decoded text data (text rendering, comparison, sorting etc...).