UTF-8 originally supported up to six-byte encodings (see eg. RFC 2279), but it was restricted to four bytes in 2003 in order to match UTF-16 constraints :(

▲

delamon an hour ago | parent [-]

We still have about 85% of codepoint space unused. Hopefully, by the time it becomes a proble, UTF-16 will be long dead

▲

nasso_dev an hour ago | parent [-]

i hope so too, but UTF-16 being used by languages such as java and javascript makes me fear it might be here to stay.... i hope im wrong

	▲	hnlmorg 12 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The number of glyphs available by adding additional bytes drops exponentially because each subsequent byte has one less bit available. So I think if we ever were in a situation where > 1 million code points isn’t enough, then we should look at an entirely new way to serialise those code points.
	▲	35 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]