Is wchar_t needed for unicode support?

Question

Is the wchar_t type required for unicode support? If not then what\'s the point of this multibyte type? Why would you use wchar_t when you could accomplish the

Answer 1

wchar_t is absolutely NOT required for Unicode. UTF-8 for example, maintains backward compatibility with ASCII and uses plain 8-bit char. wchar_t mostly yields support for so-called multi-byte characters, or basically any character set that's encoded using more than the sizeof(char).