The choice to use UTF-32 (ie Unicode code points as integers, which might as well be 32-bit since your CPU definitely doesn't have a suitably sized integer type) is unexpected, as I had seen so many other systems just choose to work entirely in UTF-8 for this problem.
Now, Brian obviously has much better instincts about performance than I do and may even have tried some things and benchmarked them, but my guess would have been that you should stay in UTF-8 because it's always faster for the typical cases.
Now, Brian obviously has much better instincts about performance than I do and may even have tried some things and benchmarked them, but my guess would have been that you should stay in UTF-8 because it's always faster for the typical cases.