It’s been 30 years. Unicode predates C++98. Java saw the writing on the wall. There’s no excuse.
I politely disagree. None of the programming languages which started integrating Unicode was targeting from bare metal to GUI, incl. embedded and OS development at the same time.
C++ has a great target area when compared to other programming languages. There are widely used libraries which compile correctly on PDP-11s, even if they are updated constantly.
You can't just say "I'll be just making everything Unicode aware, backwards compatibility be damned, eh".
But the C++ overlords could always add a new type that is Unicode-aware. Converting one Unicode string to another is a purely in-memory, in-CPU operation. It does not need any I/O and it does not need any interaction with peripherals. So one can dream that such a type along with its conversion routines could be added to an updated standard library without breaking existing code that compiles correctly on PDP-11s.
...but it's a complex operation. This is what libICU is mostly for. You can't just look-up a single table and convert a string to another like you work on ASCII table or any other simple encoding.
Germans have their ß to S (or capital ß depending on the year), Turkish has ı/I and i/İ pairs, and tons of other languages have other rules.
Esp, this I/ı and İ/i pairs break tons of applications in very unexpected ways. I don't remember how many bugs I reported, and how many workarounds I have implemented in my systems.
Adding a type is nice, but the surrounding machinery is so big, it brings tons of work with itself. Unicode is such a complicated system, that I read that even you need two UTF-16 characters (4 bytes in total) to encode a single character. This is insane (as in complexity, I guess they have their reasons).
Because there are more than 65,535 characters. That's just writing systems, not Unicode's fault. Most of the unnecessary complexity of Unicode is legacy compatibility: UTF-16 & UTF-32 are bad ideas that increase complexity, but they predate UTF-8 which actually works decently well so they get kept around for backwards compatibility. Likewise with the need for multiple normalization forms.
So, seeing this just moved the complexity of Unicode one notch up in my head, and I respect the guys who designed and made it work. It was not whining or complaining of any sort. :)
It takes up to eight bytes per character in Unicode if you want to support both Chinese and Japanese in a single font using IVS(and I don't think there's any font that actually supports this).
AFAICS(As far as I can search), Simplified(PRC) and Traditional(Taiwan) Chinese encoding are respectively called GB2312 and Big5, and they're both two byte encodings with good practical coverage. Same applies for Japanese Shift_JIS. If e.g. :flag_cc: were allowed to be used as start-of-language marker, one could theoretically cut that back down to two bytes per character without losing much and actually improving language supports.
FYI, it's never S. If there is no better option then SS and ss are the proper capital and lowercase substitutions.
Until mid-2000s there was no certainty Unicode will eventually defeat competitors. In real it havenʼt fully yet - GB2312 and Tron are still locally prevailing, and IBM still jogs with EBCDIC. But at its early times nobody was reasonably sure, and Java attempt could have failed as well. (More so Java approach for UCS-2 was wrong - already commented nearby.)
By not committing to UCS-2 early C++ left the road open to UTF-8. I'll concede that UTF8 has risen as the clear winner for more than a decade and C++ is well past the point that it should have at least basic builtin support. The problem is that there is at least one important C++ platform that only very recently added full support for the encoding in their native API.
You can actually end up in a cleaner state in C++, as there is no obligation to use the standard library string classes, but it's pretty much required in Java.