[mardifoufs]

That thread was infuriating. Since when does an encoding format have an evangelical task force? I'm all for UTF8 everywhere but wow some of the replies were super cringe.

Even when the proposal of "UTF-16 default, UTF-8 optional" was made to keep backwards compatibility, it was not enough. It has to be UTF8 because it's superior technically, as if that's the only consideration! I agree they should've just picked one, but I still don't think the maintainers needed a refresher on what is UTF-8 every 3 comments.

[sillysaurusx]

Count me among the UTF-8 everywhere absolutists. There are two ways to encode text: UTF-8, and a worse choice.

But I wouldn’t be annoying about it. I’d just tut tut from afar. (Though if the decision is still up in the air, I’d argue as passionately as any preacher to persuade our fellow devs to adopt our lord and savior UTF-8 into their hearts and minds.)

[mardifoufs]

Yeah I would absolutely take utf8 everywhere. I hate dealing with anything else.

But I think the worst part was that the maintainer was clear that he/she wasn't debating this on a technical level. Like, they weren't trying to decide which encoding was better. From what I understand it was more about how best to deal with the (at the time) current design choices without breaking the current implementations, and feedback from actual implementers.

[inferiorhuman]

I'm inclined to agree that some manner of backwards compatibility is important. A middle ground with a path towards exclusive UTF-8 use seems like a fine compromise. However three things come to mind:

* LSP is being used outside of VSCode, and while UTF-16 may be helpful in that case it's a hinderance for others.

* Institutional knowledge of UTF-16 ain't great at Microsoft either. Github broke rendering of multibyte characters and it took a random GH user to the devs explain how multibyte characters and strings interact in Javascript before that got fixed.

* [insert lots of handwaving about the downsides of electron]