To be fair, proper codepoint processing is a pain even in Java, which was created back when Unicode was in 16-bit mode. Now that it's extended to 32-bits, proper Unicode string looping looks something like this:

    for(int i = 0; i < string.length();) {
        final int codepoint = string.codePointAt(i);
        i += Character.charCount(codepoint);
    }