You can't abandon them if you want to have fast code. It is possible to write code in a portable fashion, accepting utf-8 as a standard string encoding, but th

You can't abandon them if you want to have fast code. It is possible to write code in a portable fashion, accepting utf-8 as a standard string encoding, but this will then require converting to/from utf-16 for virtually every Windows API call that takes in a string variable. Not hard to do (MultiByteToWideChar), but there's a non-negligible performance penalty.