> MS Notepad and MS Office save Unicode text files in UTF-16-LE,
> unless you explicitly specify UTF-8, just like many other Windows
> applications that support Unicode text files:

I'd be curious to know if people actually edit *text files* using
Microsoft Word (rather than Word documents).
Same for Notepad, which is much too poor to edit something else
than a 10-line configuration file.

> You are forgetting that wchar_t is UTF-16 on Windows, so UTF-16
> is all around you when working on Windows, not only in the OS APIs,
> but also in most other Unicode APIs you find on Windows:

Still, unless those APIs get passed rather large strings, the performance
different should be irrelevant IMHO. We're talking about using those APIs
from Python, not from a raw optimized C program.