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hmry • yesterday at 8:12 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

In the eternal words of the Microsoft Game Development Kit docs[0], "Windows operates natively in UTF-16 [...]. This is a unique burden that Windows places on code that targets multiple platforms."

I wonder when Microsoft will stop being a "UTF-16 house" adding UTF-16 to new projects... They did it again to LSP, and that was in 2016. Maybe by 2045 Microsoft will use UTF-8 for new projects, and then by 2100 we can switch to UTF-8 by default.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/gaming/gdk/docs/gdk-dev/ov...


Replies

tredre3 • yesterday at 8:31 PM

> 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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