Why isn't wchar_t widely used in code for Linux / related platforms?

Question

This intrigues me, so I\'m going to ask - for what reason is wchar_t not used so widely on Linux/Linux-like systems as it is on Windows? Specifically, the Windo

Answer 1

wchar_t is not the same size on all platforms. On Windows it is a UTF-16 code unit that uses two bytes. On other platforms it typically uses 4 bytes (for UCS-4/UTF-32). It is therefore unlikely that these platforms would standardize on using wchar_t, since it would waste a lot of space.