And UTF-8 isn't even fully compatible with windows UTF-16 - UTF8 can't encode a lot of truncated windows UTF-16 filenames.. You need WTF-8 for that.

https://artoria2e5.github.io/XB18030/

It seems when designing Unicode most energy went into emoji. And there was nothing left for fancy things like fixed-length string buffers. The only explaination why UTF8 Buffers aren't compatible with UTF16 Buffers... is a really strong emoji...

Thankfully, this is changing. Win32's 'A' ANSI/ASCII APIs now support UTF-8 if your app declares such a wish. https://stackoverflow.com/a/69181417/1350209