It's not about the space, it's about the use of what is supposed to represent written glyphs for graphical effects which are becoming increasingly complex. There is nothing in principle that would limit infinite expansion of the space of emojis, and their capabilities.
The functionality was always there (think ê vs ê), so properly handling glyph segmenting a string requires returning a `Vec<Vec<char>>`, which makes these emoji actually very useful: it makes it more likely that implementations will do the right thing by giving people from "predominantly ASCII" locales a "tool" to exercise those codepaths. Widespread emoji adoption is likely the best thing that could have happened to proper text handling for users outside of the anglosphere.
With Unicode, concerns of running out of space are absurd. There are almost a million unallocated codepoints. At the rate codepoints are being allocated, we won't run out for at least 250 years, and emoji are less than 3% of those allocations. Also, the biggest limitation on the number of codepoints is UTF-16, which we have to pray is dead by the late 2200s (when it dies, we'll have over 2 billion unallocated codepoints.)
If Slack/Discord/etc. custom emojis get used enough, do they get incorporated into Unicode? I've seen something like 40 variants of laughing emoji, and closer to 400 variants of Pepe the Frog, and I'm not even in any "alt right" or 4chan-adjacent chat rooms/guilds where I imagine there are even more. Not to mention the countless custom anime face ones.
Godwin's second law: any sufficiently long discussion about Unicode includes a discussion about emoji :)
Yeah, it does seem to come up a lot more often than discussions about U+5350.
Why? Unicode isn't running out of space any time soon.
It's not about the space, it's about the use of what is supposed to represent written glyphs for graphical effects which are becoming increasingly complex. There is nothing in principle that would limit infinite expansion of the space of emojis, and their capabilities.
The encoding has gotten out of hand with compound emoji. Splitting them on glyph boundaries is non-trivial.
The functionality was always there (think ê vs ê), so properly handling glyph segmenting a string requires returning a `Vec<Vec<char>>`, which makes these emoji actually very useful: it makes it more likely that implementations will do the right thing by giving people from "predominantly ASCII" locales a "tool" to exercise those codepaths. Widespread emoji adoption is likely the best thing that could have happened to proper text handling for users outside of the anglosphere.
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640K should be enough for anybody.
With Unicode, concerns of running out of space are absurd. There are almost a million unallocated codepoints. At the rate codepoints are being allocated, we won't run out for at least 250 years, and emoji are less than 3% of those allocations. Also, the biggest limitation on the number of codepoints is UTF-16, which we have to pray is dead by the late 2200s (when it dies, we'll have over 2 billion unallocated codepoints.)
If Slack/Discord/etc. custom emojis get used enough, do they get incorporated into Unicode? I've seen something like 40 variants of laughing emoji, and closer to 400 variants of Pepe the Frog, and I'm not even in any "alt right" or 4chan-adjacent chat rooms/guilds where I imagine there are even more. Not to mention the countless custom anime face ones.
What worries you about it?