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Yes, this. The files in the source repo are 99.9% ASCII. Anything that's not ASCII should be encoded in UTF-8 instead of some other encoding. The mailing list discussion refers to some issues we've had where characters in Shift-JIS (CP932) crept into the code base.

I don't think anyone is advocating using non-ASCII characters, such as accented characters or emoji, in identifiers.

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Exactly, and this isn't a proposal for everybody else's Java software, it's a proposal for the JDK itself.

So this isn't even close to Rust's rule (all Rust source is UTF-8), let alone a declaration that Java is going to introduce data types with Korean names or new Russian method names on existing types, it's just hey, if any part of the JDK's own source code needs non-ASCII then it should be UTF-8, and if it doesn't need to be non-ASCII that's fine because ASCII is a strict subset of UTF-8.

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