[Haskell-cafe] Re: String vs ByteString

[Johan Tibell]

On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 2:12 AM, John Meacham <john at repetae.net> wrote:

> <ranty thing to follow>
> That said, there is never a reason to use UTF-16, it is a vestigial
> remanent from the brief period when it was thought 16 bits would be
> enough for the unicode standard, any defense of it nowadays is after the
> fact justification for having accidentally standardized on it back in
> the day.


This is false. Text uses UTF-16 internally as early benchmarks indicated
that it was faster. See Tom Harper's response to the other thread that was
spawned of this thread by Ketil.

Text continues to be UTF-16 today because

    * no one has written a benchmark that shows that UTF-8 would be faster
*for use in Data.Text*, and
    * no one has written a patch that converts Text to use UTF-8 internally.

I'm quite frustrated by this whole discussion; there's lots of talking, no
coding, and only a little benchmarking (of web sites, not code). This will
get us nowhere.

Cheers,
Johan
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