[rseacord]

Going to try to answer these separately. For (1) if you mean strings that are primitive types my guess is never. When had an hour discussion on this topic at a London meeting where we were discussing new features for C11 and my take away was that this would never happen because it would require a significant change to the memory model for the language.

[rurban]

For the u8 type sure. Nobody needs a new type.

But at least add wcsnorm and wcsfc as I implemented them in the safeclib are required. Not even coreutils, grep, awk, ... can search unicode strings.

And u8 library variants of str* and wcs* are definitely needed, maybe just with uchar* not char*.

[DougGwyn]

Why would the utilities not handle unicode searching? Unicode characters match properly, the null terminator works the same, and non-ANSI codes are just one or more random 8-bit values which can be compared, copied, etc.