I haven’t scratched much past the surface and am still learning, but it doesn’t seem inundated with Norse themed anything, which I enjoy that it isn’t that way. I generally hate the trend of catchphrase derived language/library.
That’s it. Enjoy your stay in Valhalla 
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Also, I think rune is actually inherited from Go, which uses the same name. I don’t think it’s even intentional theming, it just worked out that way.
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A rune is the glyph a unicode code point number designates. It’s slowly standardizing across the programming industry. It’s only connection to Odin is the choice to use the increasingly common term.
You generally don’t call unicode glyphs “characters” because character is generally understood to mean a single 8-bit byte. Thus, the term “rune” for a multi-byte unicode glyph.
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This is great, I had no idea. Been in java-space too long
A font can actually contain multiple glyphs per codepoint (or rune in Odin terms) so you also can’t use the term glyph.
Rune is a bad term in my opinion, not just because the popularity of bad adaptions of Norse mythology in pop culture but also because it is just use as an alternative word for character, but it is probably the best we have.
There are graphemes and grapheme-clusters, which may contain one or more code points (or a multi-rune), to define a single mono-space character. Rune is just a subset (or simplest set) of a larger set of possibilities. From my view, glyph is a generic word to refer to any mono-space pic-to-gram albeit a letter, word or idea, depending on the language.
See core:unicode
import "core:unicode/utf8"
graphemes, runes, width := utf8.grapheme_count("öá")
Sorry to be late, I just stumbled on this post…
I know this is largely irrelevant, but palaeography being my field, I could not stop myself from commenting!
“Runes” have nothing to do with mythology!
Even if out of (actual) use since more or less a millennium and a half, the runic alphabets are not mythological, they are archaeologically (and codicologically) attested entities, encoding real texts in real languages spoken by real peoples. Simple look at Wikipedia for an overview of their several types, their span of use over time and space…
They are not even strictly tied to Norse culture, having being used over a quite larger area than Norse speaking peoples.
Then, of course, the term is also employed for other writing system, unrelated to any Germanic population, like the old Hungarian ‘runes’, but this is another topic…
Thanks!
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