alt Hacker NewsI have a love-hate relationship with backwards compatibility. I hate the mess - I love when an entity in a position of power is willing to break things in the name of advancement. But I also love the cleverness - UTF-8, UTF-16, EAN, etc. To be fair, UTF-8 sacrifices almost nothing to achieve backwards compat though.
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> To be fair, UTF-8 sacrifices almost nothing to achieve backwards compat though.
It sacrifices the ability to encode more than 21 bits, which I believe was done for compatibility with UTF-16: UTF-16’s awful “surrogate” mechanism can only express code units up to 2^21-1.
I hope we don’t regret this limitation some day. I’m not aware of any other material reason to disallow larger UTF-8 code units.
> I love when an entity in a position of power is willing to break things in the name of advancement.
It's less fun when you have things that need to keep working break because someone felt like renaming a parameter, or that a part of the standard library looks "untidy"
Yeah I honestly don't know what I would change. Maybe replace some of the control characters with more common characters to save a tiny bit of space, if we were to go completely wild and break Unicode backward compatibility too. As a generic multi byte character encoding format, it seems completely optimal even in isolation.
> To be fair, UTF-8 sacrifices almost nothing to achieve backwards compat though.
There were apps that completely rejected non-7-bit data back in the day. Backwards compatibility wasn't the only point. The point of UTF-8 is more (IMO) that UTF-32 is too bulky, UCS-2 was insufficient, UTF-16 was an abortion, and only UTF-8 could have the right trade-offs.