WARNING: As of the 5.6.1 release, the implementation of Unicode support in Perl is incomplete, and continues to be highly experimental.

It may be experimental, but it's still quite usable, and for better or worse, people have been using it for years now.

Look, it would be nice if everyone used 5.8 and I could just ignore 5.6.1, but sadly, I can't, and neither should other module writers. This length() replacement is the only portable way I've found to write byte-oriented network code that works with versions of Perl going back to 5.005. (POE uses a similar scheme to accomplish the same thing, and you can see the results here.)