@divVerent @Suiseiseki @wolf480pl @a1ba utf-16 was propped up by microsoft and sun as a misguided attempt to get out of how unicode turns all string operations from o(1) to o(n). the idea was if you just use 16-bit cells then you are back to being able to just reach at an arbitrary rune.

this is false because diacritics still exist in utf-16. and utf-16 STILL has characters it cannot represent (the ones outside the standard bitmap plane) so you STILL have to perform local checks to see if you are about to slice directly in to a rune at the wrong place.

basically unicode sucks and some corporate coders tried to get around it and made everything suck even more.