Meh. The w_char stuff is barely C's fault. You use wide (constant width) characters then set the terminal encoding to utf8 (variable length encoding). What did you expect? It's a windows issue. I can copy paste all sorts of utf8 in "normal" string literals, printf and puts them, and it just works in my terminal.

RE counting characters: this is a whole can of worms. Do you want to count grapheme clusters? Code points? Anything other than just the amount of bytes? Use a unicode library.

The latter part of this article is a bit like those articles that make fun of javascript for having floating point numbers behave like, gasp, floating point numbers.