Indeed, ICU as well, and then they all moved to UTF-16, which, again. in the long term lost to UTF-8. My point is that committing on a specific Unicode design 3

Indeed, ICU as well, and then they all moved to UTF-16, which, again. in the long term lost to UTF-8. My point is that committing on a specific Unicode design 30 years ago was not, in retrospect, necessarily a good idea. By not committing to UCS-2 early C++ left the road open to UTF-8. I'll concede that UTF8 has risen as the clear winner for more than a decade and C++ is well past the point that it should have at least basic builtin support. The problem is that there is at least one important C++ platform that only very recently added full support for the encoding in their native API.