Utf-8 can be implemented with plain old 8-bit chars. It does not need the wide chars like UCS-2, for example, where every character is 16 bytes. Therefore, by

Utf-8 can be implemented with plain old 8-bit chars. It does not need the wide chars like UCS-2, for example, where every character is 16 bytes. Therefore, by going to utf8 instead of ucs2, we did not have to go to wide chars.