Comment by dmz73

UTF8 is a horrible design. The only reason it was widely adopted was backwards compatibility with ASCII. There are large number of invalid byte combinations that have to be discarded. Parsing forward is complex even before taking invalid byte combinations in account and parsing backwards is even worse. Compare that to UTF16 where parsing forward and backwards are simpler than UTF8 and if there is invalid surrogate combination, one can assume it is valid UCS2 char.