alt Hacker News> Why on bloody Earth should a presumably generic-purpose OS provide a special API for dealing with internal representation of some data structure in a (particular) implementation of a (particular) programming language?
Because the purpose of the OS is to facilitate applications (and, on the other end, facilitate hardware), and those applications tend to have a need to process text in-memory and then store it on the filesystem?
All you need for that is the ability to read and write binary blobs to and from files, which Windows gives you, and to know what "text files" means for the other programs on that platform. Windows itself doesn't care for text much; but the other programs have a shared convention that ASCII text files have CRLF-separated variable-length lines of text, and Unicode text files store text in UTF16-LE, (including the CRLF pairs, so those look like "\x0D\x00\x0A\x00" as raw bytes).
All of this is left to the user space to sort out, just as it is on Linux, so I am not entirely sure why you demand Windows to do more for you than Linux does.