> I wonder what the best way is to handle this disparity for international software. It seems like either you punish the Latin alphabets, or the others.
there are over a million codepoints in unicode, thousands for latin and other language agnostic symbols emojis etc. utf-8 is designed to be backwards compatible with ascii, not to efficiently encode all of unicode. utf-16 is the reasonably efficient compromise for native unicode applications hence it being the internal format of strings in C# and sql server and such.
the folks bleating about utf-8 being the best choice make the same mistake as the "utf-8 everywhere manifesto" guys: stats skewed by a web/american-centric bias - sure utf-8 is more efficient when your text is 99% markup and generally devoid of non-latin scripts, that's not my database and probably not most peoples
