[neonsunset]

Because unlike CoreLib, the standard library in C++ tends to have a lot of insanity backed in. My knowledge on it is somewhat limited but looking into its APIs for working with strings (in large inherited from C) was so traumatizing that I only ever wonder why there are still self-respecting projects that don't reimplement parts of STL.

Example: want to measure the length of a UTF-8 code point in a string and did not synchronize the call? Well, too bad, now you might have corrupted the global mutable state it relies on! (the fact that you can make such a trivial piece of code have two!!! points of thread-safety failure one is C locale and another is transcoder still refuses to leave my mind)

[neonsunset]

Can't believe someone actually went out of their way to downvote this haha

[Chaosvex]

Sounds like you weren't working with C++'s string API. std::string knows nothing about the encoding of the data it encapsulates and can be used to store anything. There are the codecvt functions but it doesn't sound like you're talking about those, either.