The closest I could find to a recommendation for UTF-8 is in UWP design guidelines: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/design/globalizing/use-utf8-cod

The closest I could find to a recommendation for UTF-8 is in UWP design guidelines: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/design/globalizing/use-utf8-code-page https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/design/globaliz... However it's not quite unequivocal. Windows still uses UTF-16 in the kernel (or actually an array of 16bit integers, but UTF-16 is a very strong convention). The code page will often allow the Win32 API to perform the conversion back and forth instead of your application doing it.