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Comment by cousin_it | Hacker News Reader

Maybe off topic, but I couldn't help thinking that "we need to show a heart icon" -> "let's use a heart emoji because it's easy" -> "let's use a specific emoji font for consistency across platforms" -> "let's import it from Google Fonts every time" seems like a problematic developer mindset.

A better heuristic is always keep in mind not only developer efficiency, but also program efficiency. I'm not saying optimize everything, but keep program efficiency in mind at least a little bit. In this case, that would've led the developer to download a tiny SVG or PNG and serve it from the app itself. Which would've avoided the problem in the post, and maybe other problems as well.

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Not off topic at all!

While in this case we’d included the emoji font for displaying user content in another part of the app, the hazard of letting a “simple” approach expand and get out of hand is part of what I wanted to convey in writing this.

I agree that the font and emoji hops aren’t great for complexity or performance, but the problem in the post was in the rendering of a tiny SVG; serving it directly would not have avoided the problem.

Not OT at all. Emojis everywere are ridiculous. And coding agents love them! They put emojis in Python log lines which inevitably break the console, and of course in web pages. Logs don't need emojis. Not sure if anything does.

I have a very vague idea about how consoles work (I mean we're talking about terminals, like, terminal emulators right?), so probably that's why I don't understand how the usage of emojis break one.

I use a lot of different OSs, and none of the default terminals seem to have any problems with emojis, even cmd on windows (which isn't even default anymore?).

So detaching from the main theme of if the use of emojis is a good idea from the start, may I get more details on how your console breaks? :)

I love using emojis in my log lines, especially symbols for info/warn/error, but it does add another layer of complexity as you have to go through so many things to make sure the text is now rendered in the right font, has Unicode support enabled, etc, etc.

I would say just reusing widely-used emojis you have already downloaded would be less error prone

... assuming it all works ofc (though you could say that about serving svgs too)

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