Watson: Launchpad now runs on Python 3

Posted Aug 4, 2021 20:02 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Watson: Launchpad now runs on Python 3 by NYKevin
Parent article: Watson: Launchpad now runs on Python 3

> It is unrealistic to assume that all APIs will "be reasonable" when so much of the computing industry was operating under the "Unicode is a 16-bit encoding" falsehood for such a long period of time (and many people still wrongly believe this!).

I agree (and even explicitly wrote that before) that in some kind of alternate world, where Linux died and Windows won UTF-16 would have been sensible choice simply because of API compatibility issues.

But in today's world enough of APIs are in UTF-8 (and even Windows finally supports it properly).

Thus today use of UTF-16 should be relegated to legacy apps.

Watson: Launchpad now runs on Python 3

Posted Aug 4, 2021 22:19 UTC (Wed) by mbunkus (subscriber, #87248) [Link]

> But in today's world enough of APIs are in UTF-8 (and even Windows finally supports it properly).

Oh wow, I hadn't been aware of that. That might mean that several libraries ported poorly from Linux might actually start working with non-ASCII paths. "Ported poorly" here means that they still use the POSIX API calls, which in turn means that passing any kind of path with characters that aren't part of the ANSI code page cannot be found. Examples of such libraries include more obscure ones (e.g. libdvdread) and some popular ones (e.g. libintl/gettext).

Thanks for pointing that out; will investigate whether this means POSIX APIs, too, not just the various -A variants of Windows' native API.