On Friday, 1 December 2017 at 23:16:45 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
On Fri, Dec 01, 2017 at 03:04:44PM -0800, Walter Bright via
Digitalmars-d wrote:
On 11/30/2017 9:23 AM, Kagamin wrote:
> On Tuesday, 28 November 2017 at 03:37:26 UTC, rikki
> cattermole wrote:
> > Be aware Microsoft is alone in thinking that UTF-16 was
> > awesome. Everybody else standardized on UTF-8 for Unicode.
>
> UCS2 was awesome. UTF-16 is used by Java, JavaScript,
> Objective-C, Swift, Dart and ms tech, which is 28% of tiobe
> index.
"was" :-) Those are pretty much pre-surrogate pair designs, or
based
on them (Dart compiles to JavaScript, for example).
UCS2 has serious problems:
1. Most strings are in ascii, meaning UCS2 doubles memory
consumption. Strings in the executable file are twice the size.
This is not true in Asia, esp. where the CJK block is
extensively used. A CJK block character is 3 bytes in UTF-8,
meaning that string sizes are 150% of the UCS2 encoding. If
your code contains a lot of CJK text, that's a lot of bloat.
Yep, that's why five years back many of the major Chinese sites
were still not using UTF-8:
http://xahlee.info/w/what_encoding_do_chinese_websites_use.html
That led that Chinese guy to also rant against UTF-8 a couple
years ago:
http://xahlee.info/comp/unicode_utf8_encoding_propaganda.html
Considering China buys more smartphones than the US and Europe
combined, it's time people started recognizing their importance
when it comes to issues like this:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/412108/global-smartphone-shipments-global-region/
Regarding the unique representation issue Jonathan brings up,
I've heard people say that was to provide an easier path for
legacy encodings, ie some used combining characters and others
didn't, so Unicode chose to accommodate both so both groups would
move to Unicode. It would be nice if the Unicode people spent
their time pruning and regularizing what they have, rather than
adding more useless stuff.
Speaking of which, completely agree with Walter and Jonathan that
there's no need to add emoji and other such symbols to Unicode,
should have never been added. Unicode is supposed to standardize
long-existing characters, not promote marginal new symbols to
characters. If there's a real need for it, chat software will
figure out a way to do it, no need to add such symbols to the
Unicode character set.
