If I understand it correctly, Erlang fares well here because it stores each character as a 32-bit integer in a list. The implication of that approach is more memory overhead for each character, but that allows you to treat strings as a list of characters and gives you all the benefits of the standard list-manipulation libraries.
But that tells us nothing about the quality of Erlang's Unicode support. Is it easy in Erlang to encode a string to its UTF-8 or Latin-1 representation and vice-versa? Are there utilities in Erlang to check whether a character is a punctuation symbol, a letter or a digit? Are there utilities to normalize Unicode strings? This one is important if you need to compare two strings.
Sorry if I sound a bit pedantic, but there is a lot more to good Unicode support than using wide characters.
Being pedantic: Erlang doesn't have a 32-bit intger type, it only has integers. The implementation uses the fixnum trick known from lisp, i.e. if the value is larger than a fixnum it is implemented as a bignum.
The main difference is the way it's displayed by default in the shell. Strings are handled with list operations, and Erlang is great for list operations.
Yeah, but still: it lets you operate on unicode "characters" pretty easily. With a ton of associated downsides (unclear string/list of integers dichotomy, wasted memory for ascii, etc)
Erlang doesn't make any assumptions about what it is.
To Erlang, it is a list of 32 bit integers. There is no difference between a list of integers and a list of characters.
The shell will transform this list of 32 bit integers with ASCII equivalents into text for your convenience, but it doesn't do any sort of conversion or typing.
