We really ought to deprecate UTF-16 someday. The fact that it pretends to be a fixed-length encoding has caused all sorts of bugs over the years, with many peop

We really ought to deprecate UTF-16 someday. The fact that it pretends to be a fixed-length encoding has caused all sorts of bugs over the years, with many people assuming n(UTF-16 codepoints) == n(characters) which breaks when the string contains non-BMP characters. And also, for personal aesthetic reasons I hate that it limits the Unicode codepoint range to an awkward non-power-of-two number (now there are 0x110000 codepoints in total). UTF-8 and UTF-32's 2^31 feels much more natural.