We constantly have to deal with Win32 as a build platform and we write our apps natively for that platform using wchar. I think the main difficulty is that most

We constantly have to deal with Win32 as a build platform and we write our apps natively for that platform using wchar. I think the main difficulty is that most developers hate adding another library to their stack, and to make matters worse, displaying this text in Windows GUI would require conversion to wchar. That's why I think they are up for a lot of resistance, at least in the Windows world. If the Windows APIs were friendlier to UTF-8, there might be hope. But as it stands right now, using UTF-8 requires the CA2W/CW2A macros, which is just a lot of dancing to keep your strings in UTF-8 which ultimately must be rendered in wchar/UTF-16. Maybe there might be a shot in getting developers to switch if Windows GUIs/native API would render Unicode text presented in UTF-8. But right now, it's back to encoding/decoding.