Unicode in Microsoft Windows

<a href="/facts/Microsoft/nGIDDXdx">Microsoft</a> was one of the first companies to implement <a href="/facts/Unicode/DDu3MfPV">Unicode</a> in their products. <a href="/facts/Windows_NT/EtccWvxQ">Windows NT</a> was the first operating system that used "wide characters" in <a href="/facts/System_call/NW44AFJr">system calls</a>. Using the (now obsolete) <a href="/facts/UCS-2/7Tn6LPLw">UCS-2</a> encoding scheme at first, it was upgraded to the <a href="/facts/Variable-width_encoding/2LygbAV6">variable-width encoding</a> <a href="/facts/UTF-16/ofSmbCem">UTF-16</a> starting with <a href="/facts/Windows_2000/amJIt9gz">Windows 2000</a>, allowing a representation of additional planes with surrogate pairs. However Microsoft did not support <a href="/facts/UTF-8/xlaVHSyf">UTF-8</a> in its API until May 2019.
Before 2019, Microsoft emphasized UTF-16 (i.e. -W API), but has since recommended to use <a href="/facts/UTF-8/xlaVHSyf">UTF-8</a> (at least in some cases), on Windows and <a href="/facts/Xbox/c4vCQ0kC">Xbox</a> (and in other of its products), even states "UTF-8 is the universal code page for internationalization [and] UTF-16 [... is] a unique burden that Windows places on code that targets multiple platforms. [..] Windows [is] moving forward to support UTF-8 to remove this unique burden [resulting] in fewer internationalization issues in apps and games".
A large amount of Microsoft documentation uses the word "Unicode" to refer explicitly to the UTF-16 encoding. Anything else, including UTF-8, is not "Unicode" in Microsoft's outdated language (while UTF-8 and UTF-16 are both Unicode according to <a href="/facts/Unicode/DDu3MfPV">the Unicode Standard</a>, or encodings/"transformation formats" thereof).

Unicode in Microsoft Windows open-in-new

Unicode in Microsoft Windows