[acdha]

I'm defining “exchange” as not just the outside world but also among components in your own architecture. I've flushed out enough problems with the UCS-2 / UTF-16 breakage that I've become somewhat sold on the unambiguous nature of UTF-8.

For the classic double-byte languages, what's your total data size after compression? e.g. in the case of full-text search, enabling compression has been enough of a win that the 2/3-byte expansion hasn't been a challenge, particularly since the biggest UTF-8 drawback (inability to predict total byte string length) isn't an issue when working with a data structure which records the length of each record.