Re: g_malloc overhead

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad behdad org>]

MartÃn Vales wrote:
> I can see the advantages of use utf8 but the true itÂs most of people
> use utf16. I know gnome/linux/cairo/freedesktop promote utf8 but most
> people use utf16:
> http://unicode.org/notes/tn12/#Software_16

This is a very baseless claim.  One that actually turns out to be false.  Most
people don't right Windows code.  Most people read and write content on the
internet, and I bet more than 99% of the Unicode content on the net is in UTF-8.

As for the technical note you cite, it's a very biased document of its own.  I
once wrote a full critical review of it but can't find it.  Lets just say that
UTF-16 is at best implementation details of Firefox.  I can't see how that can
be relevant here.  Moreover, it's plain wrong that Python uses UTF-16.  Python
APIs are encoding-agnostic, and while Python 2.x can be compiled with UCS-2,
it's recommended that UCS-4 be enabled.  And note the difference: I said
UCS-2, not UTF-16.

UTF-16 is a disease.  It's variable-width, so it doesn't have the benefits of
UTF-32.  It's sixteen bit, so it doesn't have the ASCII-compatibility of
UTF-8.  Tell me one good thing about it other than "everyone made the mistake
of using it and now they have to keep doing that because they exposed it in
their API".

behdad