kre was coming from a "per draft source character set" i think.
But of course, application dependent. It is more general than "i
really need this now to get nmh (or mailx) going". When i went
online around 2010 there was a Python member (Murray, who did the
rewrite of the Python mail engine) who was (or is) an nmh user, as
he said. I looked at nmh but i think it could not even do MIME by then?
It depends on what you mean. nmh, back when it was MH, could do MIME,
but the support was ... not wonderful, if you wanted to deal with modern
messages. It is better now.
But even with only columns there are problems, like bidi.
In one sense, we kinda don't have to deal with this because we just feed
our output into a pager. Probably in theory we could do better, but we
have a ways to go until our MIME support is good enough to deal.
For serialization you are surely right. This imposes a conversion
back and forth to wchar_t with POSIX interface, then. And you
have already lost the performance battle.
Are you running on super slow machines? I can't really imagine that
really impacting performance in any measurable way.
So UTF-8 pretties up stuff for an all-american or all-english view.
Well, guilty on both counts, but I think if you're concerned about size
then it probably is more compact for most European languages as well.
--Ken