When I wrote a very primitive UTF-8 library, I really began to appreciate UTF-8's design. For example; the first byte says how many bytes the character requires. At first it was daunting, but when I put 2 and 2 together, it really opened up.

I am sure there are many aspects I am missing about UTF-8, but it is all reasonable in its design and implementation.

For reference, I was converting between code points and actual bytes, and also implemented strlen and strcmp (which for the latter the standard library apparently handles fine).