wchar_t for UTF-16 on Linux?

Question

Does it make any sense to store UTF-16 encoded text using wchar_t* on Linux? The obvious problem is that wchar_t is four bytes on Linux and UTF-16 takes usually two (or sometimes two groups of two) bytes per character.

I'm trying to use a third-party library that does exactly that and it seems very confusing. Looks like things are messed up because on Windows wchar_t is two bytes, but I just want to double check since it's a pretty expensive commercial library and may be I just don't understand something.

Answer 1

While it's possible to store UTF-16 in wchar_t, such wchar_t values (or arrays of them used as strings) are not suitable for use with any of the standard functions which take wchar_t or pointers to wchar_t strings. As such, to answer your initial question of "Does it make sense...?", I would reply with a definitive no. You could use uint16_t for this purpose of course, or the C11 char16_t if it's available, though I fail to see any reason why the latter would be preferable unless you're also going to use the C11 functions for processing it (and they don't seem to be implemented yet).