Comment by kbolino
18 hours ago
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.
Thanks to UTF-8, there are 13 wasted 1-byte sequences in UTF-8 :P
Assuming your count is accurate, then 9 (edit: corrected from 11) of those 13 are also UTF-16's fault. The only bytes that were impossible in UTF-8's original design were 0b11111110 and 0b11111111. Remember that UTF-8 could handle up to 6-byte sequences originally.
Now all of this hating on UTF-16 should not be misconstrued as some sort of encoding religious war. UTF-16 has a valid purpose. The real problem was Unicode's first version getting released at a critical time and thus its 16-bit delusion ending up baked into a bunch of important software. UTF-16 is a pragmatic compromise to adapt that software so it can continue to work with a larger code space than it originally could handle. Short of rewiting history, it will stay with us forever. However, that doesn't mean it needs to be transmitted over the wire or saved on disk any more often than necessary.
Use UTF-8 for most purposes especially new formats, use UTF-16 only when existing software requires it, and use UTF-32 (or some other sequence of full code points) only internally/ephemerally to convert between the other two and perform high-level string functions like grapheme cluster segmentation.
Pretty sure 0b11000000 and 0b11000001 are also UTF-8’s fault. Good point with the others, I guess. And I agree about UTF-8 being the best, just found it funny.
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