alt Hacker News> Unfortunately, in software, manufacturing costs are too cheap to meter, so we're fine with using bench-top prototypes in production, because we're not the ones paying the costs for the waste anyway, our users are.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say - UTF-8 is the standard text encoding by a mile. It’s not a prototype.
UTF-8 here is like having a devboard with an USB controller chip, complete with power circuitry and USB port. It could all be high-quality components, it's super useful to have it on the board for prototyping, but in the actual product, you aren't going to ship three devboards wired by SPI, but each carrying some combination of USB, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth controllers and other stuff, all of it disabled/unused, all because you need three ICs and found it easier to order devboards. You're just going to use the ICs you care about, supply the USB controller and port and necessary wiring yourself, and otherwise use minimum amount of extra components necessary.
So, in context of Mikhail_Edoshin's example, I'm saying that this "text shaping library" they mention is basically a devboard - full of components not necessary for its core functions. Most software libraries are like that, so applications using them are basically like a device built from wiring up a bunch of devboards.