slcon 2015 09 frign utf 8 everywhere

This talk discussed UTF-8 and its history, how and when you have to deal with it and which challenges had been faced along the way, evaluating its advantages over other character encodings. Besides more trivial problems like decoding and encoding, advanced issues like string comparison, case conversion and normalization were discussed, leading to the conclusion that the POSIX wchar-interfaces are broken by design. Using suckless principles, problems with the ICU libraries were discussed and a midway drawn between total localization and minimalism, presenting possible solutions.