Why UTF-8/16 character encodings?

[Walter Bright]

On 5/25/2013 9:48 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> Then came along D with native Unicode support built right into the
> language. And not just UTF-16 shoved down your throat like Java does (or
> was it UTF-32?); UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32 are all equally supported.
> You cannot imagine what a happy camper I was since then!! Yes, Phobos
> still has a ways to go in terms of performance w.r.t. UTF-8 strings, but
> what we have right now is already far, far, superior to the situation in
> C/C++, and things can only get better.

Many moons ago, when the earth was young and I had a few strands of hair left, a 
C++ programmer challenged me to a "bakeoff", D vs C++. I wrote the program in D 
(a string processing program). He said "ahaaaa!" and wrote the C++ one. They 
were fairly comparable.

I then suggested we do the internationalized version. I resubmitted exactly the 
same program. He threw in the towel.