No, it&#x27;s important to understand the distinction between char and wchar_t. Both are relevant, but in different contexts. char should be considered a byte type to pass around UTF-8 with. This is the appropriate level for the large majority of common string operations, such as concatenation, outputting strings directly, parsers that only handle ascii characters specially, and so on.<p>Those applications don&#x27;t really care about the actual unicode codepoints besides ASCII. If you start to deal with visual representation of strings, calculating the column for error messages, advanced unicode-aware parsing, font rendering, and so on, then you do want to convert on the fly to wchar_t. mbsrtowcs and such are kinda bad, because they convert the whole string at once, which means an allocation that can fail in the unbounded case. It&#x27;s usually sufficient to decode one wchar_t at a time with mbrtowc.<p>This way, char and wchar_t are not replacements for each other, but complement each other by being better abstractions for various purposes. Now, the wide stdio functions is where things start to get a bit useless, because the regular stdio char functions are perfectly fine and those functions don&#x27;t really appeal well to the strengths of wchar_t.