Oil has better Unicode support than Python 2 or 3 for shell-like tasks, because of the way file systems, libc, and the kernel work.

Explained here:

http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2018/03/04.html#faq

which links:

http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2014/1/9/ucs-vs-utf8/ (by Armin Ronacher)

The summary is that there are two kinds of Unicode support:

- UTF-8 based: Go, Rust, and Oil (and Perl 5 it seems, not sure about Raku)

- array-of-codepoint based: bash/zsh/libc, Python, Java, JavaScript, Windows (JavaScript notably requires surrogate pairs, Python used to have build time configuration, now has complex storage heuristics, etc.)

This isn't a theoretical problem -- the Unicode problems in the other comment thread I linked are real and show up in practice.