I agree that iterating over UTF-16 code units can never be less painful than iterating over UTF-32 codepoints, but to be fair Java (like Win32) comes from more

I agree that iterating over UTF-16 code units can never be less painful than iterating over UTF-32 codepoints, but to be fair Java (like Win32) comes from more than fourteen years earlier when we still hoped UCS-2 would be enough for the world.