[0x1d7]

NT shipped with USC-2 as UTF-8 (and -16) did not yet exist. USC-2 naturally translated to UTF-16, hence the choice. NT/Win32 is also designed for fixed-with code units, something UTF-8 doesn't support.

You can use UTF-8 on a per-application basis, within limits.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design/global...

Conversely, UEFI is UTF-16 only, thanks to Windows.

UTF-8 only would be an ABI breaking change, so that's not going to happen. We don't want the NT kernel to end up like Linux, after all :-)

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> UTF-8 only would be an ABI breaking change, so that's not going to happen. We don't want the NT kernel to end up like Linux, after all :-)

I think you're making a joke, but it still doesn't make sense. Linux does avoid breaking changes to its userspace ABI

[okanat]

Linux kernel's ABI/API surface is completely byte-based and is tiny compared to Win32 API. The stable ABI of Windows is strictly in the user space and it covers the entire useful operating system. Don't forget that glibc isn't that ABI stable nor anything that goes all the way up to systemd/X11/gettext/Wayland/cairo/GTK/Qt/glade/Pipewire/xdg. Nothing equivalent in Linux environment is stable, especially compared against Win32 system libraries.

You encounter encoding requirements not in kernel system calls but in more user-facing sides of the OS. So your comparison should include all the userspace components of a Linux system (e.g. gettext), if you're considering the places where you encounter actual Unicode string-based operations where UTF-16 comes into play in Windows.

ALL OF THE equivalent Windows libraries (user32.dll, kernel32.dll, ws2_32.dll, shellex.dll ...) to the Linux ones I counted above and more are ABI and API stable.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

See, I was sympathetic to that view, except that they specifically posted

> We don't want the NT kernel to end up like Linux, after all

(Emphasis mine)

And that's... The one part of the OS where Linux is ABI stable.

[okanat]

I think they didn't mean Linux as in the kernel sense but in the overall "Family of OSes and ecosystem with very unstable APIs" sense.