utf8 and emacs text/string multibyte representation

[Camm Maguire <camm@maguirefamily.org>]

Greetings!  I've recently been considering supporting unicode in gcl by
representing strings internally in utf8.  It appears that emacs does the
same or similar.  Apart from the obvious memory footprint benefits, I'd
like to ask what other advantages/disadvantages have been discovered.
Much of the utf8 literature emphasizes that most algorithms can proceed
conventionally in byte-wise fashion, including lexicographical ordering
comparisons, given that almost all jobs are sequential, at least
initially.  A cached internal pointer storing the last referenced
codepoint offset makes access essentially O(1).  Yet setting string
elements can trigger reallocations/memmove operations.  While these can
be aggregated over the setting of multiple elements, operations like
nreverse look ridiculous if left in terms of calls to aref and aset.

Thoughts, advice and experiences most appreciated.

Take care,
-- 
Camm Maguire			     		    camm@maguirefamily.org
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"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."  --  Baha'u'llah