Comment by gpvos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gpvos | Hacker News Reader

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Windows NT 3.1 was released in July 1993. Early versions of Windows NT used UCS-2. At that time, UTF-8 was not very well known yet, and it was certainly too late to change all that code, and especially the APIs.

I'm not sure about Java and Javascript, but I think they were developed before it became clear to most people that UCS-2 was not going to be enough (which was around, or likely even sometime after the time that UTF-16 was published in 1996).

Windows NT, Java and Javascript became popular, and none of them could easily change the width of their standard character encoding, which was also used internally in all of their code.

The goal of UTF-8 was to have an 8-bit encoding compatible with ASCII; that it could also encode more than 65.536 code points was more like a lucky accident. Maybe there was already talk about the need to extend Unicode beyond 2^16 code points, but nothing had been standardized at that time.

I think folks who weren't there might not realize how big a deal the original Unicode standard was and how quickly technology vendors raced to adopt it. Windows NT, for example, must have been developed with Unicode in mind even before the standard was official. In those circumstances the broad adoption of UCS-2 was effectively inevitable.

Even if UTF-8 had been widely known, I don't think the eventual necessity for > 16-bit code points was clear enough to have given it a chance against the relatively easy architectural shift of replacing one fixed-length character encoding with another.

One factor is that back in the early 90s China was still an economically backward, closed Communist enclave barely more integrated into the global economy than North Korea is now. One of the deciding factors in having to decisively move beyond the BMP was China's adoption of GB 18030 as a mandatory standard in 2006[1].

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GB_18030

> One factor is that back in the early 90s China was still an economically backward, closed Communist enclave barely more integrated into the global economy

I'd disagree, China was well on the way to becoming an economic power house in the early 90's:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-year_plans_of_China#Eight...

But it wasn't yet. Decades later, the infrastructure stabilized (although in 2010 consumer network products were still incredibly chaotic).

It certainly wasn't the North Korean type of basket case simonh was accusing it of being.

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