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Even in 2017, not everyone is a Web or Electron developer. I certainly am not.

I don’t advocate using UTF16 for the web, but people still code native desktop apps, mobile apps, embedded software, videogames, store stuff in various databases, etc. For such use, markup is irrelevant.

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Even outside Web, you still have mostly-ASCII:

* filenames

* identifiers

* config files

* text protocols

* host names, email addresses

* embedded scripts (including SQL and OpenGL shaders)

* command line interfaces

* translations for languages using Latin alphabets

I don't think 2/3 size reduction for some languages will offset the cost in all the other places.

If English is your world yeah.

Some of us use other languages and like to use them everywhere we can.

For some of these things we don’t have much choice, because the encoding is part of some lower-level API (file system, OpenGL, CLI), which usually don’t accept arbitrary encoding. They accept only one, and unless you want to waste time converting, you better use that exact encoding.

Other stuff like IDs, shaders before GL 4.2, and many text protocols aren’t Unicode at all.

For configs I usually use UTF-8 myself, because I don’t like writing parsers for custom formats and just use XML, and any standard-compliant parser supports all of them.

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