This is silly... not only is the article inaccurate but the problem described is trivial to solve. As long as you know what encoding wchar_t uses and what encoding your data is stored in this is not a big problem, use one format internally and convert your data on the way in as appropriate. Trust me, I solved it with no prior knowledge, no formal education in less than a day, as a distraction during my day job... I did not have to re-write the entire library from scratch.