Java, C#, VM Performance and Benchmarks

[Mike Capp]

In article <dvqlqn$2ea8$1 at digitaldaemon.com>, Kevin Bealer says...
>
>(And in many cases Java isnt this tradeoff, it just throws a little performance
>or power out the bus window, e.g. using UCS-16 instead of UTF8 (what is the
>gain here?)

At the time, simplicity. I think they thought that 16 bits was as big as Unicode
characters were ever going to get. Given that (incorrect) assumption, it was a
sensible decision - it lets you treat a string as an array of characters, which
is hugely convenient for all sorts of things. You can't do that with UTF8.

cheers
Mike