How to waste computer memory?

[Ian Kelly]

On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 1:21 PM, Rick Johnson
<rantingrickjohnson at gmail.com> wrote:
> In the event that i change my mind about Unicode, and/or for
> the sake of others, who may want to know, please provide a
> list of languages that *YOU* think handle Unicode better than
> Python, starting with the best first. Thanks.

jmf has been asked this before, and as I recall he seems to feel that
UTF-8 should be used for all purposes, ignoring the limitations of
that encoding such as that indexing becomes a O(n) operation. He has
pointed at Go as an example of a language wherein Unicode "just
works", although I think that others do not necessarily agree [1].

He also seems to have a strange notion of the meaning of the word
"buggy". He frequently uses that word to describe the Python 3.3
Unicode implementation, although he can't seem to demonstrate any
actual bugs. Instead, he points at cherry-picked micro-benchmarks that
show Python's old "narrow" Unicode implementation (which did not
properly support SMP characters, unlike the "wide" implementation
which was a much greater memory hog than the version he's now
complaining about) outperforming the PEP-393 implementation while
completely ignoring any real-world benchmarks.

[1] https://coderwall.com/p/k7zvyg/dealing-with-unicode-in-go