Some languages, like V and Charcoal use their own character systems. In the meantime, next to all languages support common (one byte) UTF-8 characters with only a single byte as well.
Should code-golf be scored in UTF-8, or language charsets?
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\$\begingroup\$ Not quite. I'm wondering which is preferred between language bytecount and standardized bytecount. \$\endgroup\$– JessLovelyApr 11, 2017 at 5:34
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Code golf answers should be scored in whatever the interpreter can digest. If there's an X bytes file that does what it's supposed to do, you can claim a score of X bytes.
UTF-8 doesn't even apply to all languages. There are plenty of them (both older practical and newer recreational languages) that do not even understand UTF-8/Unicode, so encoding the source code in UTF-8 for scoring purposes is rather arbitrary. Other languages force you to use UTF-16. Again, UTF-8 doesn't make sense in this case.
Finally, there are languages that do not even have a concept of character (TI-Basic, byte code, etc.), and thus cannot be represented by any character encoding.
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\$\begingroup\$ Should the BOM be counted if it's the only way an interpreter will accept a file of a given encoding? \$\endgroup\$– PavelApr 11, 2017 at 5:36
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\$\begingroup\$ Might be worth posting this or something similar as an answer to the dupe target. "Answers are scored by the size of a file your language implementation understands, regardless of encoding" is our de facto standard, but it's not written down like that on the most relevant meta post, I think. \$\endgroup\$ Apr 11, 2017 at 8:33