Hacker News Reader

I used to think UTF was a great thing. But I came to realize it isn't good to go through all this trouble just to keep using a 70s US-centric API. UTF is error prone and the problems are often subtle and hard to catch.

Also, the same API has serious issues with buffer overflows and off by 1. It would be great to move on.

View on HN

Oh, do tell us how an encoding specification can have a buffer overflow in it.

API as in the standard C API and obviously the part for ASCII string management. The UTF encoding was designed to keep that API working with Unicode. How would an encoding standard be an API? (Application Programming Interface)

I can't believe your smug attack gets voted up. You just proved you're either an idiot or a troll. You add nothing to the discussion.

What do you suggest instead? UTF-32?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com