Variable encoding is absolutely good choice for i18n. It forces you to give up random access, which is nearly impossible for i18n text processing (just thinking

Variable encoding is absolutely good choice for i18n. It forces you to give up random access, which is nearly impossible for i18n text processing (just thinking of a vowel followed by 2 or more accents). i18n libraries, such as popular regexp package, can easily deal with utf-8 with much penalty. Of course, the library has to deal with all kinds of complexity anyway, the random access was never a real need anyway. DISCLAIM: I contributed to regexp package of a major programming language.