What's the point of UTF-16?

Question

I\'ve never understood the point of UTF-16 encoding. If you need to be able to treat strings as random access (i.e. a code point is the same as a code unit) then you need UTF-3

Answer 1

UTF-16 covers the entire BMP with single units - So unless you have a need for the rarer characters outside the BMP, UTF-16 is effectively 2 bytes per character. UTF-32 takes more space, UTF-8 requires variable-length support.