The Tragedy of UCS-2
I've been wondering, how much processor overhead does UTF8 have? Not just because you can't jump N bytes into a string to get a character offset, but because each byte has to be inspected to find whether it's the start of a multi-byte segment, how many of the subsequent bytes 1-3 are included.Does that mean there's processor branch-prediction fails and stalling every few bytes in processing UTF8 strings with many multibyte characters in them?