Err...this works fine for me if I use UTF-8 rather than wide strings, eg: std::string s("foo\u203D"); std::cout << s << std::endl; Also, he's completely wron

Err...this works fine for me if I use UTF-8 rather than wide strings, eg: std::string s("foo\u203D"); std::cout << s << std::endl; Also, he's completely wrong about the program terminating on output of a wide string, it's just that wcout is broken. If he had tried causing output afterwards with, say, printf(), he'd notice the program is still alive. Or running it in GDB would show this just as well. It's generally speaking a bad idea to test whether your program is alive, using the same mechanism that you suspect of killing it!