[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]