As far as I know, wchar_t is meant to be an internal only representation, so it's good that it is 32 bits--that way you are in one codepoint per word territory.

As far as I know, wchar_t is meant to be an internal only representation, so it's good that it is 32 bits--that way you are in one codepoint per word territory. It's a mistake to think you can just overlay some unicode binary data with a wchar_t pointer--you need to convert into and out of wchat_t from utf8/utf-16/whatever. Otherwise you aren't handling codepoints above 16 bits correctly.