Why don't wide characters work with libstdc++?
The wide-character parts of the GCC Standard C++ Library (libstdc++) have not yet been fully ported to Windows, so you cannot use most of these features with MinGW. If you try to use things like
std::wcout
or
basic_string<wchar_t>
then you will probably get compiler or linker errors.
This has been discussed frequently on the mailing lists; e.g. see:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnu.mingw.user/10818 [4]
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnu.mingw.user/12917 [5]
If you really need these features then one alternative is to use the STLPort library from http://www.stlport.org/ [6] instead of libstdc++.