Part of the problem is legacy Windows cruft. For long time to properly handle Unicode characers you needed to explictly use widechar UTF-16 functions. Legacy na

Part of the problem is legacy Windows cruft. For long time to properly handle Unicode characers you needed to explictly use widechar UTF-16 functions. Legacy narrow encoding is systemwide setting, couldn't be set to UTF8, thus only subset of characters would be represented correctly. Only recently they introduced ability to set narrow encoding for application to UTF-8 with setlocale, which is a lot saner.