> The only modern language that gets it right is Swift:

arguably not true:

  julia> using Unicode

  # for some reason HN doesn't allow emoji
  julia> graphemes(" ")
  length-1 GraphemeIterator{String} for " "

  help?> graphemes
  search: graphemes

  graphemes(s::AbstractString) -> GraphemeIterator


  Return an iterator over substrings of s that correspond to the extended graphemes in the string, as defined by Unicode UAX #29. (Roughly, these are what users would perceive as single characters, even though they may contain more than one codepoint; for example a letter combined
  with an accent mark is a single grapheme.)