[flohofwoe]

Ugh, why are BOMs even still a thing in the 21st century? E.g. when will Windows finally arrive in the late 1990s and switch to UTF-8 for everything?

The UTF-8 BOM is especially bizarre because UTF-8 is completely endian-agnostic (so this "UTF-8 Byte Order Mark" is at most an indicator that this file is UTF-8 encoded, but guess what? Outside the Windows bubble, all text files are UTF-8 anyway).

[gdwatson]

Windows bought into Unicode hard before Unicode expanded beyond 16 bits. The consequence is that its native strings are theoretically UTF-16, but often behave like UCS-2, allowing random halves of surrogate pairs. Windows APIs reflect that, Windows filenames reflect that, and translation into UTF-8 has to reflect that -- somehow. It's not great.

Personally I'd like a world where Unicode gave up all the compromises that come with supporting UTF-16. But presumably burning all your early adopters is not a winning strategy.