Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't need any fancy data structures. 95% of the performance goes into glyph rendering. And with Unicode the performance gain from monospace fonts goes out the window as some Unicode characters are very large, and not only that they also take up many bytes. So one Unicode character can be up to 5 bytes long and take up the same canvas space as 3 characters. You also need to read ahead as there are combination cha…
> So one Unicode character can be up to 5 bytes long and take up the same canvas space as 3 characters. 5 bytes? In what encoding?
There was an emoji example of length seven posted to HN recently:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36159443>