This is incorrect. Java supports Unicode in source files just fine, as long as the file encoding is correct. The problem is that certain IDEs (such as Eclipse)

This is incorrect. Java supports Unicode in source files just fine, as long as the file encoding is correct. The problem is that certain IDEs (such as Eclipse) default to ISO-encoding on Windows. This works fine as long as you're only using Windows, but it will fail on Linux. At my previous job certain developers preferred Windows and ended up commiting ISO-encoded source files which our build server (Ubuntu Server) failed to compile for this exact reason. A quick recode(1) usually resolves it.