Comment by cryptonector
4 years ago
Yes. I'm a bit surprised it took so long for someone to come up with something better. But if someone had tried and had come up with anything other than Rob Pike's UTF-8, we might still be sad. Sometimes you have to make mistakes before you know that's what they were.
The problem is that everyone wanted to keep simple array semantics for text, and that's not really workable with full scope of Unicode (even if you have 21-bit code points exposed, Runes, etc.)
On the plus side, because Unix was so ASCII-based, it couldn't easily make the jump to UCS-2/wchar_t. I suspect this was ultimately the motivation that led to UTF-8 (both, IBM's first attempt and Rob Pike's winner). Being late to the game sometimes means you're more prepared.