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Comment by tredre3

21 hours ago

> They did it again to LSP, and that was in 2016.

That one is explainable by the fact that it was developed for VS Code, a typescript/javascript project. Javascript uses UTF-16 for strings (for historical reasons unrelated to Microsoft, though they are the same reasons that made MS use UCS-2 during the same time period).

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tredre3

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Someone  4 hours ago

> Javascript uses UTF-16 for strings

I don’t think the spec requires that. charAt indexes on UTF-16 code points, but I don’t remember ever seeing that it has to do that in O(1) time, so that doesn’t imply the implementation has to use UTF-16 internally.

Also, for modern JavaScript, https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe... says:

“Note: Avoid re-implementing the solutions above using charAt(). The detection of lone surrogates and their pairing is complex, and built-in APIs may be more performant as they directly use the internal representation of the string. Install a polyfill for the APIs mentioned above if necessary.”

Because of that, I would hope most modern implementations to at least have a variant internal representation that is similar to UTF-8.

genxy  20 hours ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-16

> UTF-16 is used by the Windows API, and by many programming environments such as Java and Qt. The variable-length character of UTF-16, combined with the fact that most characters are not variable-length (so variable length is rarely tested), has led to many bugs in software, including in Windows itself.

  • tredre3  20 hours ago

    Absolutely, UTF-16 is bad and inexcusable in most contexts. Perhaps you misinterpreted my comment or I wasn't expressing myself properly.

    I was trying to say: If all the components in your stack are javascript-based, it makes sense that your RPC-API would also use UTF-16. It wasn't Microsoft pushing it for historical Windows reasons as GP implied, it was dictated by a JS stack they chose but didn't create.