Perl's unicode support is far from complete - especially when you consider outside-the-base-distro modules that everyone relies on. I've been running into bugs in DBD::mysql myself. I even supplied a couple of patches. Right now I would say that perl's unicode is better than most programming languages, if you only look at the base language.

I believe perl's internal distinguishing between the 8bit (latin-1) endocing and internal, multibyte (utf8) representation is the right choice for a language that has to keep strings == bytearray backward compatibility. It also keeps C <-> perl translation relatively straightforward.

Also, I must say I've not run into any unicode bugs in perl since 7 months ago, when started working on a fairly large multi-language system.

But like I said, it's not quite like that when you consider modules. Most modules on CPAN aren't under the kind of scrutiny that the base perl distro is under. Right now I'm examining a DBD::mysql bug that seems to not affect the system I'm working on, but I can't figure out why it doesn't. <--- that means; no one's going to pay me for fixing it, probably. :-)