Oh boy, this article is 20 years old. Still relevant though so go read it if you still aren’t sure about Unicode!
I would take this with a grain of salt. None of the programming languages I have used require this level of in-depth knowledge. Certainly not modern C++.
Did you see the date on the article?
It’s still true that if you have a bunch of bytes and don’t know their encoding, you don’t really know what characters you have.
It’s not so much about the programming language you use, it’s about what data you’re taking in, what you’re doing with it, and where you’re passing the data off to next.
If everything is all the same encoding, or all your data is ANSI you never have to think about it. It’s only when your program runs across systems or regions things get screwed up
