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Comment by ynik | Hacker News Reader

Windows NT started supporting unicode before UTF-8 was invented, back when Unicode was fundamentally 16-bit. As a result, in Microsoft world, WCHAR meant "supports unicode" and CHAR meant "doesn't support unicode yet".

By the way, UTF-16 also didn't exist yet: Windows started with UCS-2. Though I think the name "UCS-2" also didn't exist yet -- AFAIK that name was only introduced in Unicode 2.0 together with UCS-4/UTF-32 and UTF-16 -- in Unicode 1.0, the 16-bit encoding was just called "Unicode" as there were no other encodings of unicode.

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> Windows NT started supporting unicode before UTF-8 was invented

That's not true, UTF-8 predates Windows NT. It's just that the jump from ASCII to UCS2 (not even real UTF16) was much easier and natural and at the time a lot of people really thought that it would be enough. Java made the same mistake around the same time. I actually had the very same discussions with older die-hard win developers as late as 2015, for a lot of them 2 bytes per symbol was still all that you could possibly need.

>, UTF-8 predates Windows NT.

Windows NT started development in 1988 and the public beta was released in July 1992 which happened before Ken Thompson devised UTF-8 on a napkin in September 1992. Rob Pike gave a UTF-8 presentation at USENIX January 1993.

Windows NT general release was July 1993 so it's not realistic to replace all UCS-16 code with UTF-8 after January 1993 and have it ready in less than 6 months. Even Linux didn't have UTF-8 support in July 1993.

> public beta

Which, let's not forget, also meant an external ecosystem already developing software for it

UTF-8 was invented in 1992 and was first published in 1993. Windows NT 3.1 had its first public demo in 1991, was scheduled for release in 1992 and was released in 1993.

Technically UTF-8 was invented before the first Windows NT release, but they would have had to rework a nearly finished and already delayed OS

Also keep in mind that ISO’s official answer was UTF-1 not UTF-8, and UTF-8 wasn’t formally accepted as part of the Unicode and ISO standards until 1996. And early versions of UTF-8 still allowed the full 31 bit range of the original ISO 10646 repertoire, before it was limited to the 21 bit range of UTF-16. Also, a lot of early UTF-8 implementations were actually what we now call CESU-8, or had various other infelicities (such as accepting overlong encodings, nowadays commonly disabled as a security risk). So even in 1993, I’m not sure it was yet clear that UTF-8 was going to win.

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