Does any language do Unicode and cross-platform properly and fully? - unicode

Question

I've used a good few programming languages over the years and I'm an armchair linguist and contributor to Wiktionary. I've been making some of my own tools to look up Wiktionary from the commandline but I've run into a surprising problem.
Neither Perl nor Python can output Unicode to the console natively under both *nix and Windows (though there are various workarounds). The main reason is that *nix OSes like their Unicode in UTF-8 and Windows likes its Unicode in UTF-16. But it also seems that Windows makes it very difficult to use wide characters with the console even though both the console and wprintf are wide character native.
So the question is, is the situation any better if I look beyond these languages into Java, C#, Scala, etc. Or are there any scripting languages which started out on Windows and were then ported to *nix?
Here is some ideal pseudocode:
function main()
{
print( L"hello, 世界" );
}

Answer 1

Does any language do Unicode and cross-platform properly and fully?
C# supports Unicode very extensively. Its standard library (.NET Framework) also has outstanding support for Unicode. Cross-platform is reasonable, but not perfect: it's achieved via Mono, and on mobile platforms via Xamarin.
Command-line programs are pretty portable but can get screwed by ancient relics, like SSH terminals that haven't been updated for a decade or more.
Here is some ideal pseudocode:
C# gets pretty close:
using System;
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
Console.OutputEncoding = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8;
Console.WriteLine("tést, тест, τεστ, ←↑→↓∏∑√∞①②③④, Bài viết chọn lọc");
}
}
Screenshot of the output (use Consolas or another font that has all the above characters):
Of course C# is not a scripting language; it is quite different in its approach to pretty much everything.

Answer 2

AFAIK almost all scripting languages started in the Unix world and were then ported to Windows. I don't know any example of a (scripting) language that started on Windows... One scripting language that seems to do pretty fine with Unicode these days is Ruby.

Answer 3

Eight and a half years have passed and things are improving.
NodeJS was the first language to "just work" out of the box with Unicode on *nix, Mac, and Windows using Unicode in their terminals/consoles without regard to whether the OS preferred UTF-8 or UTF-16.
At the time I asked this question, this did not work for Perl, Python, or Ruby. I'm not sure about PHP. But at least the Python developers eventually took the relevant bug report / feature request seriously and put some work into it. Python has now worked with cross-platform in-terminal Unicode for some years.
I just started looking at Rust, and thought to check this. I was very pleasantly surprised that they also took this issue seriously and Rust is the first low-level / non-scripting language to just work out of the box cross-platform with Unicode in the console on Mac, Windows, and *nix.

Answer 4

Perhaps this is one of the workarounds you hinted at, but: You can chcp 65001 in a 'DOS box' with a non-raster font select and view UTF-8 output from scripts (or programs) that run unchanged under Unix or Windows. The price to pay is that .bat/.cmd files won't execute.