It's the historical interface which websites now rely on, changing it would be like writing a libc with strcmp operating on Pascal strings. In any case, a Java

It's the historical interface which websites now rely on, changing it would be like writing a libc with strcmp operating on Pascal strings. In any case, a Javascript String is not actually designed to be UTF-16, it is essentially just an `uint16_t[]`. Even textual strings just store UTF-16 code units, not full UTF-16 data. Relevant snippets from the standard: The String type is the set of all finite ordered sequences of zero or more 16-bit unsigned integer values ("elements"). When a String contains actual textual data, each element is considered to be a single UTF-16 code unit. [...] All operations on Strings (except as otherwise stated) treat them as sequences of undifferentiated 16-bit unsigned integers; they do not ensure the resulting String is in normalised form, nor do they ensure language-sensitive results. See also: - Section 8.4 http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST/Ecma-262.pdf http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST... - http://mathiasbynens.be/notes/javascript-encoding http://mathiasbynens.be/notes/javascript-encoding