I always assumed that Unicode string handling was some dark art. However, I've seen that the Windows API has functions for comparing Unicode strings, for example. Does that mean that it's actually feasible to write a Unicode string class that can perform simple actions like sorting, equality comparison, and extraction from a file? Or are there hidden gotchas in the use of these functions that makes it actually a really bad idea? I'm just looking at libraries like ICU and they seem incredibly over-complicated compared to what a Unicode string class backed by the Windows API could actually look like, which would resemble the Standard string classes quite closely.