Unicode is in the news today as some folks with waaay too much time on their hands have discovered a string consisting of Latin, Arabic, Devanagari, and CJK characters that crashes Apple devices when it appears as a pop-up message.
Although most people seem to identify it correctly as a CoreText bug, there are a handful, as you might expect, who attribute it to some shady weirdness in Unicode itself. My favorite quote from a Reddit user was this: "Every character you use has a unicode value which tells your phone what to display. One of the unicode values is actually never-ending and so when the phone tries to read it it goes into an infinite loop which crashes it." I've read TUS Chapter 4 and UTR #23 and I still can't find the "never-ending" Unicode property. Perhaps astonishingly to some, the string displays fine on all my Windows devices. Not all apps get the directionality right, but no crashes. -- Doug Ewell | http://ewellic.org | Thornton, CO 🇺🇸
