It doesn't help that many developers are introduced to the basics of Unicode by a popular Joel on Software article from 2003, which recommended the use of wchar

It doesn't help that many developers are introduced to the basics of Unicode by a popular Joel on Software article from 2003, which recommended the use of wchar_t. [1] It was a very important article for 2003, but it should be honorably retired. Its plan of action isn't as good as the modern "UTF-8 Everywhere", and even its motivating examples are becoming less relevant: when was the last time you went to the 'Encoding' menu in your web browser and guessed which codepage the page author meant to use? When was the last time you worried about whether your e-mail was 7-bit clean? [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/10/08/the-absolute-minimum-every-software-developer-absolutely-positively-must-know-about-unicode-and-character-sets-no-excuses/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/10/08/the-absolute-minim...