[chrismorgan]

There was never an adequate safety margin for anything but immediate (less than five year horizon) use—even at Unicode 1.1 it was more than half full, and they knew they weren’t done. And yet all kinds of major companies put all their eggs in that basket, and then doubled down with the monstrosity that is UTF-16, rather than backing out and going with UTF-8 instead, even though I strongly suspect it would have been easier for everyone involved in most cases, compared to the whole wchar shemozzle. Instead it took Windows twenty-five years to bridge the gap with a UTF-8 codepage (65001) that actually worked.