One byte = one "character" makes for much easier programming.
Text generally uses a small fraction of memory and storage these days.
Text generally uses a small fraction of memory and storage these days.
Only if you are naively operating in the Anglosphere / world where the most complex thing you have to handle is larger character sets. In reality, there's ligatures, diacritics, combining characters, RTL, nbsp, locales, and emoji (with skin tones!). Not to mention legacy encoding.
And no, it does not use a "small fraction of memory and storage" in a huge range of applications, to the point where some regions have transcoding proxies still.
"Anglosphere" would be just 7(&"8") bit ASCII, and it's the current situation where it takes quite a lot of skill and knowledge just to start learning how to properly deal with Unicode, because it's often not even taught !
IMHO 32-bit bytes would help tremendously with onboarding developers into Unicode, because it would force dumping ASCII-only as the starting point (and sadly, often ending point) for teaching how to deal with text.
And who can blame the teachers, Unicode is already hard enough without even having to deal with the difficulties coming from having to explain its multi-byte representation...
Last but not least : this would have forced standardization between the Unix world now on UTF-8 and the Windows world which is still stuck on UTF-16 (and Windows-1252 ?!?) for some of the core functions like filenames, which, for instance, still regularly results in issues working with files with non-ASCII filenames.
[1] at runtime, you could dynamically assign 'virtual' codepoints to grapheme clusters and get a fixed-length encoding for strings that way
I am thankful that almost all the Unicode text I see is rendered properly now, farewell the little boxes. Good job lots of people.