I need to read and write

.properties

files in ISO-8859-1. Does Native offer something related to this charset or am I on my own?

it doesn't at this time. https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/KT-53318

Thanks! Yeah I was experimenting, see the other posts.

I can see how it's confusing, but it's not really

So basically the backing array is always UTF-16 units, which are then converted transparently to UTF-8 for any kind of C-interop.

hypothetically that doesn't need to be the case; for example, on JVM String has a specialization for Latin-1 only strings. but it should not have any behavior noticeably different than that, yes

I guess for the ones working with Windows APIs the fact a string is represented as UTF-16 is an advantage. And btw, now I can see what you're saying:

public val String.cstr: CValues<ByteVar>
    get() = if (isEmpty()) EmptyCString else CString(encodeToUtf8(this))

public val String.wcstr: CValues<UShortVar>
    get() = U16CString(this.toCharArray())

Only the

cstr

performs a conversion. And on the runtime the string is identified as UTF-16

const KChar* utf16 = CharArrayAddressOfElementAt(thiz, start);