The Windows console has been Unicode aware for at least a decade and perhaps as far back as Windows NT. However for some reason the major cross-platform scripting languages including Perl and Python only ever output various 8-bit encodings, requiring much trouble to work around. Perl gives a "wide character in print" warning, Pythong gives a charmap error and quits. Why on earth after all these years do they not just simply call the Win32 -W APIs that output UTF-16 Unicode instead of forcing everything through the ANSI/codepage bottleneck?

Is it just that cross-platform performance is low priority? Is it that the languages use UTF-8 internally and find it too much bother to output UTF-16? Or are the -W APIs inherently broken to such a degree that they can't be used as-is?