On Saturday, 30 August 2025 15:59:09 Pacific Daylight Time Oliver Hunt wrote:
> I’m saying that we don’t have widespread use of utf16 in C and C++.
[cut\
> I am unclear on why you seem so adamant about adding new utf16 APIs when
> no one who works with unicode believes that utf16 is a good answer to any
> problem, most vendors of APIs that use utf16 regret those APIs, most
> language standards that specified thet use of utf16 as their string
> representation regret it, new languages and APIs are in terms of utf8,
> unless there are specific platform reasons that _require_ un-abstracted
> utf16/char16_t interfaces.

Because I seem to have a very different experience from you. Starting with the
quote above: that there isn't widespread use of UTF-16 in C and C++. That's
patently false, given that Qt and ICU exist. I don't know about ICU, but in Qt
we're perfectly comfortable with UTF-16 and we have little need to change to
anything else.

Whether a historical mistake or not, they exist and use UTF-16 content, and
I'd very much like to use the future abilities of the C++ Standard Library
without having to transcode to UTF-8 or (shudder) locale encoding.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago (AT) macieira.info - thiago (AT) kde.org
  Principal Engineer - Intel Platform & System Engineering