Space savings are irrelavent. Text is small, and after gzip its going to be the same anyways.
Seriously, when was the last time where you both cared about saving a single kb, but compression was not an option. I'm pretty sure the answer is never. It was never in the 90s, it is extra never now that we have hard drives hundreds of gb big.
UTF-8 is better because bytes are a natural unit. You dont have to worry about surrogates. You dont have to worry about de-synchronization issues. You dont have to worry about byte order.
Backwards compatibility with ascii and basically every interface ever, also helps. (Well not 7bit smtp..). The fact is, ascii is everywhere. Being able to treat it as just a subset of utf-8 makes a lot of things easier.
> (eg, most emoji) require four bytes each in both systems.
This is misleading because most emoiji are not just a single astral character but a combination of many.
Saving disk space and synchronization is only important for network transmission. At the local level, you will need to convert to something where you can get/know positioning, utf8 does not allow for this given its variability, this means a lot of operations are more expensive and you will have to convert to utf16 anyway.
Seriously, when was the last time where you both cared about saving a single kb, but compression was not an option. I'm pretty sure the answer is never. It was never in the 90s, it is extra never now that we have hard drives hundreds of gb big.
UTF-8 is better because bytes are a natural unit. You dont have to worry about surrogates. You dont have to worry about de-synchronization issues. You dont have to worry about byte order.
Backwards compatibility with ascii and basically every interface ever, also helps. (Well not 7bit smtp..). The fact is, ascii is everywhere. Being able to treat it as just a subset of utf-8 makes a lot of things easier.
> (eg, most emoji) require four bytes each in both systems.
This is misleading because most emoiji are not just a single astral character but a combination of many.