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Comment by Dylan16807 | Hacker News Reader

> Not just platform-dependent, but user’s preferred locale-dependent.

Historically it made sense to be locale-dependent, but even then it was annoying to be platform-dependent.

One is not a subset of the other.

Not sure what you mean by that with regard to encodings. The C APIs were explicitly designed to abstract from that, and together with libraries like iconv is was rather straightforward. You only needed to be aware that there is a difference between internal and external encoding, and maybe decide between char and wchar_t.

Not everything is C, and nothing like that saves you when you move your floppy between computers.

> platform-dependent.

It's 2024 and we still can't all agree on line endings. Mac vs Win vs Unix...

Mac OS and Unix agreed about twenty years ago to use the same ending: https://superuser.com/a/439443

By which time XP was already in the middle of releasing, so it was too late to get Windows on board.

It's too bad, with a bit more planning and an earlier realization that Unicode cannot in fact fit into 16 bits then Windows might have used UTF-8 internally.

Unless I’m mistaken, Rhapsody (released 1997) used LF, not CR. At that point it was pretty clear Mac was moving towards Unix through NeXTSTEP, meaning every OS except windows would be using LF. Microsoft would’ve had around 6 years before the release of XP, and probably would’ve had time to start the transition with Win2K at the end of 1999.

Every OS except the one that had 95% market share in late 90s. Apple was only propped up “Weekend at Bernies” style to appease regulators.

> and an earlier realization that Unicode cannot in fact fit into 16 bits

The Unicode consortium already realized it when they decided on Han unification, they just didn't accept it yet.

It's 2024, everything but Windows is UTF-8 \n since twenty years.

Linux was definitely not uniformly UTF-8 twenty years ago. It was one of the many available locales, but it was still common to use other encodings, and plenty of software didn't handle multibyte well in general.

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