Also on UTF-16: > Alas, if your language needs to run on or interoperate with the browser, the JVM, or the CLR, you might be stuck with [UTF-16] And Windows.

Also on UTF-16: > Alas, if your language needs to run on or interoperate with the browser, the JVM, or the CLR, you might be stuck with [UTF-16] And Windows. Win32 and COM APIs use UTF-16 natively, so if you want to avoid lots of conversions on Windows, UTF-16 is the way to go. Maybe the best solution would be an abstraction that lets you choose the internal string encoding at compile time.