string16

String16 refers to a fixed-width character encoding scheme designed to represent Unicode characters. Unlike variable-width encodings like UTF-8, each character in String16 is allocated a consistent number of bytes, typically 16 bits or 2 bytes. This fixed allocation simplifies certain string manipulation operations and can lead to predictable memory usage.

String16 is commonly associated with UTF-16, which is a widely adopted Unicode encoding. In UTF-16, characters from the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) are represented by a single 16-bit unit. Characters outside the BMP, known as supplementary characters, are represented using surrogate pairs, which consist of two 16-bit units. This means that while the fundamental unit is 16 bits, representing all Unicode characters can sometimes require 32 bits in practice.

The primary advantage of String16, or more accurately encodings like UTF-16 that utilize 16-bit units, lies in its efficiency for languages whose characters are predominantly within the BMP, such as many European languages. This can make string processing faster in certain contexts compared to encodings that might use more bytes for these common characters. However, for languages with a large number of characters outside the BMP or for efficient storage of primarily ASCII text, other encodings like UTF-8 might be more space-efficient.