On 8/14/19 7:00 PM, Niall Douglas wrote:
>
> I can't say for sure, but given Windows 10's ever improving UTF-8
> support, I wouldn't be surprised if Windows goes mixed UTF-8/16 in the
> near future. Stuff like NTFS will remain UTF-16, but other NT kernel
> stuff could use UTF-8 and nothing would notice. The kernel itself is
> agnostic.

This is possible, but see the the following meeting summary for the SG16
telecon from earlier this year. According to the Microsoft
representative we met with, there are no concrete plans.
- https://github.com/sg16-unicode/sg16-meetings#may-22nd-2019

>
> If you're feeling brave, you can already legally configure your Windows
> 10 to be default UTF-8 for all 8 bit encodings, and it appears to
> actually work. That means that main() gets UTF-8 as argv, and so on,
> just like on POSIX.

The reason that this option remains a "beta" option is because,
according to Microsoft, enabling it currently breaks too many widely
used applications. There is no time line for when this option may exit
"beta" status. I believe we were told there is also no timeline for
making this option the default on new installations and, due to
compatibility concerns, Microsoft will never attempt to change the ACP
of an existing Windows installation. That all means that good UTF-8
support with wide deployment on Windows won't happen any time soon.

Tom.