Re: g_malloc overhead

[Colin Walters <walters verbum org>]

On Sun, Jan 18, 2009 at 11:43 AM, Martín Vales <martin opengeomap org> wrote:
>
> Other overhead i see is the open dir/file funtions, where in windows we need
> do the utf8 to utf16 everytime in windows. If JAVA,.NET and Qt use utf16 by
> default why in gnome world we use utf8 by default?.

Historically, Unix was a late adopter of Unicode.  And crucially, the
Unicode designers originally thought 16 bits would be enough.  So Java
was explicitly designed around Unicode and specifically UTF-16, and
Windows was a relatively early adopter.  Only later did it became
clear that more code point space was needed, and also that UTF-8
specifically had a number of advantages.

Strings and encodings are actually a pretty interesting subject I
think, and for any programmer it's worth taking some time to read
available material on the web at least.