Explore the intricate world of Unicode in this comprehensive conference talk. Delve into the historical origins of writing systems, from ancient Sumerian and Egyptian scripts to modern-day emoji. Uncover the complexities behind text encoding, including common issues like mojibake and platform-specific text crashes. Gain insights into handling complex text beyond ASCII in computer systems, particularly for applications dealing with diverse character sets. Journey through the evolution of Unicode, understanding its intricacies and the reasons behind its complexity. Examine past, present, and future C++ support for Unicode, tracing the progression from C to the latest SG16 plans for C++23. Learn about various writing systems, character encoding, and the challenges of displaying Unicode across different platforms.