Comment by 1oooqooq

> UTF-16 is both simpler to parse and more compact than utf-8 when writing non-english characters.

UTF-8 and UTF-16 take the same number of characters to encode a non-BMP character or a character in the range U+0080-U+07FF (which includes most of the Latin supplements, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, and Thaana). For ASCII characters--which includes most whitespace and punctuation--UTF-8 takes half as much space as UTF-16, while characters in the range U+0800-U+FFFF, UTF-8 takes 50% more space than UTF-16. Thus, for most European languages, and even Arabic (which ain't European), UTF-8 is going to be more compact than UTF-16.

The Asian languages (CJK-based languages, Indic languages, and South-East Asian, largely) are the ones that are more compact in UTF-16 than UTF-8, but if you embed those languages in a context likely to have significant ASCII content--such as an HTML file--well, it turns out the UTF-8 still wins out!

> When you leave the anglosphere you'll find that some languages still default to other encodings due to how large utf-8 ends up for them (Chinese and Japanese, to name two).

You'll notice that the encodings that are used are not UTF-16 either. Also, my understanding is that China generally defaults to UTF-8 nowadays despite a government mandate to use GB18030 instead, so it's largely Japan that is the last redoubt of the anti-Unicode club.

All of Europe outside of the UK and Enligh-speaking Ireland need characters outside of ASCII, but most letters are ASCII. For example, the string "blåbærgrød" in Danish (blueberry porridge) has about the densest occurrence of non-ASCII characters, but that's still only 30%. It takes 13 bytes in UTF-8, but 20 bytes in UTF-16.

Spanish has generally at most one accented vowel (á, ó, ü, é, ...) per word, and generally at most one ñ per word. German rarely has more than two umlauts per word, and almost never more than one ß.

UTF-16 is a wild pessimization for European languages, and UTF-8 is only slightly wasteful in Asian languages.

UTF-16 is also just as complicated as UTF-8 requiring multibyte characters to cover the entirety of Unicode, so it doesn't avoid the issue you're complaining about for the newest languages added, and it has the added complexity of a BOM being required to be sure you have the pairs of bytes in the right order, so you are more vulnerable to truncated data being unrecoverable versus UTF-8.

UTF-32 would be a fair comparison, but it is 4 bytes per character and I don't know what, if anything, uses it.

It's all fun and games until you hit an astral plane character in utf-16 and one of the library designers didn't realize not all characters are 2 bytes.

Thanks to UTF-16, which came out after UTF-8, there are 2048 wasted 3-byte sequences in UTF-8.

And unlike the short-sighted authors of the first version of Unicode, who thought the whole world's writing systems could fit in just 65,536 distinct values, the authors of UTF-8 made it possible to encode up to 2 billion distinct values in the original design.

UTF-16 is absolutely not easier to work with. The vast majority of bugs I remember having to fix that were directly related to encoding were related to surrogate pairs. I suspect most programs do not handle them correctly because they come up so rarely but the bugs you see are always awful. UTF-8 doesn't have this problem and I think that's enough reason to avoid UTF-16 (though "good enough" compatibility with programs that only understand 8-bit-clean ASCII is an even better practical reason). Byte ordering is also a pernicious problem (with failure modes like "all of my documents are garbled") that UTF-8 also completely avoids.

It is 33% more compact for most (but not all) CJK characters, but that's not the case for all non-English characters. However, one important thing to remember is that most computer-based documents contain large amounts of ASCII text purely because the formats themselves use English text and ASCII punctuation. I suspect that most UTF-8 files with CJK contents are much smaller than UTF-16 files, but I'd be interested in an actual analysis from different file formats.

The size argument (along with a lot of understandable contention around UniHan) is one of the reasons why UTF-8 adoption was slower in Japan and Shift-JIS is not completely dead (though mainly for esoteric historical reasons like the 漢検 test rather than active or intentional usage) but this is quite old history at this point. UTF-8 now makes up 99% of web pages.

With BOM issues, UTF-16 is way more complicated. For Chinese and Japenese, UTF8 is a maximum of 50% bigger, but can actually end up smaller if used within standard file formats like JSON/HTML since all the formatting characters and spaces are single bytes.

UTF-16 has endian concerns and surrogates.

Both UTF-8 and UTF-16 have negatives but I don't think UTF-16 comes out ahead.

Two decades ago the typical simplified Chinese website did in fact use GB2312 and not UTF-8; traditional Chinese website used Big5; Japanese sites used Shift JIS. These days that's not true at all. Your comment is twenty years out of date.

There are no sane Chinese Japanese people who uses old encodings. None