it's almost scandalous how poorly Unicode has been implemented in the most popular development platforms.
Java, for instance, implemented 2-byte encoding and uses surrogates for the higher planes, which means you get the worst of both worlds... You double the size of ASCII text (that is, half the speed of bandwidth-limited operations on text) and you've still got a variable length encoding... but you've got lots of methods and user-written code that assume that the text is fixed length encoded. what a mess
Java, for instance, implemented 2-byte encoding and uses surrogates for the higher planes, which means you get the worst of both worlds... You double the size of ASCII text (that is, half the speed of bandwidth-limited operations on text) and you've still got a variable length encoding... but you've got lots of methods and user-written code that assume that the text is fixed length encoded. what a mess