alt Hacker NewsThe first draft of Unicode was in 1988. Thompson and Pike came up with UTF-8 in 1992, made an RFC in 1998. UTF-16 came along in 1996, made an RFC in 2000.
The time machine would've involved Microsoft saying "it's clear now that USC-2 was a bad idea, so let's start migrating to something genuinely better".
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gpvos • today at 5:16 AM
MS could easily have added proper UTF-8 support in the early 2000s instead of the late 2010s.
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I don't think it was clear at the time that UTF-8 would take off. UCS-2 and then UTF-16 was well established by 2000 in both Microsoft technologies and elsewhere (like Java). Linux, despite the existence of UTF-8, would still take years to get acceptable internationalization support. Developing good and secure internationalization is a hard problem -- it took a long time for everyone.
It's now 2026, everything always looks different in hindsight.