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I submitted this mostly as a demonstration.  I don't think
the approach is necessarily suitable for a final
implementation because of the use of utf-8 as an
intermediate representation and the price of the conversions
that keep happening.  But perhaps this is the way to go, if
we consider utf-8 to be a stage-1 default file system
encoding for win32.

I also agree that 4 is probably the most sensible approach.
 What about discrepancies between e.g. linux and windows
then, when including from a non-trivial path?  On linux we
would get utf-8, on windows unicode?

1) would actually make a lot of sense, only in my experience
this tends to lead to a kind of unicode-hell since a program
touched by one unicode object tends to have it percolating
down into every corner.