UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32

[me22]

On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 17:40, Dallas Clarke <DClarke@unwired.com.au> wrote:
> The heart of this issue is that GCC is not compatible with MS VC++, by
> defining wchar_t as 4-bytes and not providing any 16-bit Unicode support -
> it just going to be too hard to continue porting to Linux.
>

Then why does GCC need to change, rather than MSVC++, which caused the
problem in the first place?  Why shouldn't MSVC++ be using UTF-32
instead of UTF-16?  strchr is a good example of one way in which
UTF-32 is a better fit, and I have yet to see any reason why UTF-16 is
better, other than "well, Windows is installed all over the place".

> At the end of the day if you want to live in a world where you only consider
> yourself - then you can live in that world by yourself. Like you said, if I
> don't like it I can use another language and GCC will become irrelevant, you
> can all go your own separate way.
>

I suspect you'll find that rather a high percentage of other languages
either use GCC indirectly, or require GCC to build themselves or their
runtimes.

> Also I have written my own scripting language, designed to add functionality
> post installation, its not that hard.
>

Which, I expect, didn't even need to be turing complete, let alone
deal with mountains of legacy code, dozens of platforms, or backwards
compatability.  A bad interpreter is trivial, I agree.

~ Scott