However, it's true that Unicode is (relatively speaking) very new for such a fundamental technology. Support in applications still varies widely. I wouldn't characterize it as cutting edge though, since we have many mainstream programming languages built using Unicode internally.
TFA notes that this is not fixed, the `utf-8` mysql encoding still isn't utf-8. And as TFA also notes related technologies (aka drivers) may not be compatible with it (the example he uses, mysql2 for Ruby, still hasn't had an official release supporting utf8mb4[0])
> it's true that Unicode is (relatively speaking) very new for such a fundamental technology
That's becoming quite hard an argument to swallow when encountering astral planes issues in 2012 when Unicode 2.0 was introduced in 1996.
> That's becoming quite hard an argument to swallow when encountering astral planes issues in 2012 when Unicode 2.0 was introduced in 1996.
I don't get your argument. MySQL was also released around that time and we don't call it "cutting edge" because we found a bug. There are bugs in old stuff all the time but (most) people don't throw a fit.
Not supporting astral planes and saying you're supporting utf-8 is not a bug, it's a lie.
Creating a new character set `utf8mb4` was the right thing to do, as annoying as it is. Just clearly label the `utf8` collation as 'deprecated' in the docs or something.
Or they could just have implemented it correctly to start with, considering unicode "support" was introduced in mysql 4.1.
In 2005.
> Who knows what software out there depends on it breaking on 4-byte characters, or whatnot.
Then again, mysql routinely drops and corrupts data anyway, I'm sure its "users" could have dealt with it corrupting data slightly less than before.