Re: [Haskell-cafe] Haskell future and UTF8 vs UTF-16

On 11 Feb 2018, at 10:39, Alan & Kim Zimmerman wrote:

What is the current and future status of UTF8 vs UTF-16 in the haskell world?

I understand that currently Text uses UTF-16, and it is used generally because of compatibility requirements in the Microsoft ecosystem, but that there are movements afoot to move to a UTF8 only environment at some unspecified future point.

As far as I know there was a UTF-8 fork of Text made as part of the Summer of Code a year or so ago, but it got ditched because it turned out to be slower than the UTF16 version in practice. So as far as I know, there's no real plan to adopt to UTF8, especially since the internal encoding used by Text is pretty much irrelevant by most users of Text. Cheers, Merijn