Re:JEP254: proposal to represent Java Strings as ISO-8859-1
by chrisseaton on Friday May 15, 2015 @06:22AM
(#9549754)
I guess at the time the JVM was less aggressively optimised, and UCS-2 was a single simple approach that represented all required code points. Anything else would probably have looked like a micro-optimisation.
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Re:JEP254: proposal to represent Java Strings as ISO-8859-1
by desdiv on Friday May 15, 2015 @10:07AM
(#9550634)
At the time UCS-2 was the best thing they could choose from. Remember, Java predates UTF-8.
Re:JEP254: proposal to represent Java Strings as ISO-8859-1
by MrBuddyCasino on Friday May 15, 2015 @08:05AM
(#9550040)
But back then we had less memory, and Java was never that memory efficient to begin with. I wouldn't say double-digit memory savings are in the realm of overly pedantic micro optimisations.
One language whose name escapes me took an approach where the internal representation is always unicode codepoints, and Strings have methods for projecting those .toUTF8() or whatever to interact with the outside world - I liked that a lot due to its simplicity, anyone knows which language that was?