The article should be called "What it takes to do anything Windows API in C++". For example, this Unicode issue is applicable to almost every API there. And it

The article should be called "What it takes to do anything Windows API in C++". For example, this Unicode issue is applicable to almost every API there. And it is not as simple as "call MultiByteToWideChar twice". Microsoft did not support UTF-16, they UCS-2, which they called "Unicode", but in fact back then it was just a wider ASCII. The worst thing about UCS-2 is that it does not support roundtrip. For example, imagine, that you wrote your Enterprise MS Tech Contoso Ltd.(R) authentication system, where user registers in UTF-8 on webpage, then on some layer it checks that user with the same name (in UTF-8 modern DB) does not exist, then it writes user basic information in UCS-2 encoded legacy "Enterprise DB". Aaand... Voila, Evil User overrides data of other user, because UTF-8 can't losslessly represent arbitrary sequences of 16-bit code units (should have used https://simonsapin.github.io/wtf-8/ https://simonsapin.github.io/wtf-8/ instead, but your Enterprise tech was destroyed).