I remember feeling a twinge of this worry (long before emoji) back when
Unicode officially limited itself to 17 planes instead of the 65535
planes of full-blown (at the time) ISO-10646. (That's a thing that
happened, right? Or am I inventing history?) Gee, sooner or later
things will run out... But be realistic. It *is* true that with
characters always being added and never removed, eventually the current
stock could eventually run out; that's just math. But it isn't just the
current trends place that happening way in the future; we also don't
expect current trends to continue. Unicode was never meant to be
infinite and encompass every kind of writing that will ever be
invented. We're already filling in the corners with obscure scripts
now, and there are only so many more writing systems worth encoding.
Same with emoji (well, maybe). We would hope that the growth of the
emoji set would slow down as most of the important symbols get encoded.
(It is a little hard to say for certain because emoji aren't like other
things, and we're still sort of figuring out how to treat them.)
So, yes, I understand the knee-jerk feeling that "there's only a limited
supply!" and also the feeling that everyone else is just pretending the
problem is SOOO far in the future when they should know better... but it
really kind of *is* that far off.
~mark
On 3/22/26 6:06 PM, Doug Ewell via Unicode wrote:
Lee Shallis wrote:
Sooner or later the current pool will run out.
That’s like saying “Sooner or later, the earth will crash into the sun.” It’s
not like Y2K, where developers created problems that surfaced within decades;
this is more like centuries or millennium.
You may want to examine this page if you are interested in the actual rate at
which the Unicode codespace is being consumed:
https://www.unicode.org/versions/stats/
--
Doug Ewell, CC, ALB | Lakewood, CO, US | ewellic.org
