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Comment by SAI_Peregrinus

> Unicode is such a complicated system, that I read that even you need two UTF-16 characters (4 bytes in total) to encode a single character. This is insane (as in complexity, I guess they have their reasons).

Because there are more than 65,535 characters. That's just writing systems, not Unicode's fault. Most of the unnecessary complexity of Unicode is legacy compatibility: UTF-16 & UTF-32 are bad ideas that increase complexity, but they predate UTF-8 which actually works decently well so they get kept around for backwards compatibility. Likewise with the need for multiple normalization forms.

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