Have you ever looked at a Unicode emoji of a happy family and wondered how that actually works? Have you been to websites where was a common sight? Is your name in a computer system not O'Neill but O’Neill ? Ever wondered why some texts crashed iOS and Android? Are you involved in a computer system that deals with text that may be more complicated than ASCII - such as receiving résumés - and would you like to understand how this all works beneath the surface?
In this talk I'll be taking you through a deep dive in history, starting with the Sumerians, Egyptians and working quickly to recent history, including Irish Ogham and Devanagari through to the most recent combining emoji with Fitzpatrick modifiers and variation selectors. We'll then take a look through Unicode itself, finding out along the way how and why things are as complicated as they are. Finally, we'll take a deep dive into past, current and future C++ support, slowly iterating our way out of C and arriving at the SG16 plans for C++23.
