UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 are different encodings of the same character set, so i'm not sure what you mean in UTF-16 captures really a very large share of actual

UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 are different encodings of the same character set, so i'm not sure what you mean in UTF-16 captures really a very large share of actually used code points. next, your claim that UTF-8 is not well suited for a general purpose string implementation because it is a variable length encoding and therefore addressing a character becomes a linear time operation is incoherrent: UTF-16 is a variable length encoding just as well. come out and say that you want to be lazy and pretend surrogate pairs don't exist.