Re: Unicode is not UTF-8. was :psqlODBC-Driver Test / text

Johann Zuschlag <zuschlag2(at)online(dot)de> writes:

> Hmm..., so Windows XP uses UCS-2 or do be more correct (like Bart
> mentioned) UTF-16 (which is nearly the same, except for the
> surrogates).

It's nearly the same... but that makes a huge difference.

The reason why you use fixed-character length encoding in memory is
speed. This saves you a lot of time when computing string lengths,
look for some characters (isalnum(),...), collating etc.

If don't care about all this speed then you better stay in a
variable-length encoding like UTF-8 which saves you A LOT of space,
especially with small occidental alphabets.

I think that by moving from UCS-2 to UTF-16 you lose on BOTH sides
[insert some missing benchmarks here]

And you can be sure that it brings a lot of bugs: one bug every
time some string code has been "forgotten" and not updated, still
assuming UCS-2.

Anyway those bugs are only for far-away and unknown countries out of
the BMP so who cares? :-/

So it really looks like a poor compatibility hack to me (java does it
too).