Hacker News Reader

It's all down to CJK. Originally they allocated 21k codepoints to CJK, and if that was accurate then 16 bits would pretty much fit things.

But we currently have 88k CJK characters assigned out of possibly more than 100k total.

I can't easily find anything about how this went wrong and they got such a small number.

View on HN

> we currently have 88k CJK characters assigned

If you also count the Unihan variations registered in Unicode's ideographic variation database by various Japanese outfits, encoded using the VS16 to VS255 characters after the codepoint they modify, there's another 8k or 9k unique characters assigned.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com