[mcfig]

I see this was [posted 12 years ago](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3906253) too!

Anyway, it’s a good read and is what I have been doing too. One historical note:

> Microsoft has often mistakenly used ‘Unicode’ and ‘widechar’ as synonyms for both ‘UCS-2’ and ‘UTF-16’.

While Microsoft’s continued defaulting to UTF-16 is misguided, and continued conflation of “Unicode” to mean “UTF-16” is very confusing for everyone who isn’t a Unicode expert, it didn’t start as a mistake. Now it’s a sustained mistake - mainly because of inertia + backward compatibility at this point. And there has been movement, but inertia is real.