UTF8 space/difficulty tradeoffs

[Tamas_Papp]

@ScottPJones

concerned me about the “UTF-8 is always best” mentality, text from the languages of the vast majority of the world’s population generally takes up 50% to 200% more space encoded with UTF-8

This is correct, but another perspective on this issue is that space is usually cheap compared to programmer time and the cost of bugs, so economizing on the latter by choosing a single representation is reasonable in many circumstances.