I do not believe that UTF-8 is the way to go. In fact I know it is not, except perhaps for the very near future for some programmers ( Linux advocates ).
:-) Just for the record, I'm not a Linux advocate any more then I'm a Windows advocate. I use both .. I'm writing this on a windows machine. What I would like is the whole encoding madness/dysfunction (including but not limited to the dual TCHAR/whateverchar-based interfaces) to stop. Everywhere.
Inevitably a Unicode standard will be adapted where every character of every language will be represented by a single fixed length number of bits. Nobody will care any longer that this fixed length set of bits "wastes space", as so many people today hysterically are fixated on. Whether or not UTF-32 can do this now or not I do not know but this world where a character in some language on earth is represented by some arcane multi-byte encoding will end. If UTF-32 can not do it then UTF-nn inevitably will.
And then the HUGE codebase written in C/C++ that currently uses char will be reimplemented using some utfNN_char_t. Sorry but I don't see that happening. Best, Matus