2021年12月8日，晚上21点56分（北京时间），Tomas Kalibera 在R-dev邮件列表上发了封邮件，通知Windows平台上的R用户们，在4.2版本后，（终于）就能使用UTF-8作为native Encoding，可以和其他平台的R用户一样，保证读进来的字符默认都是UTF-8编码的了。
我同Windows的字符问题战斗了整整10年——准确来说，是被折磨得多，偶尔有反抗。看到这一天的到来，我还是很开心的——虽然我个人以后只会用mac和linux来处理程序了，但我想其他同事、其他Windows上的R用户，他们的时间将还是会被省掉不少的。
不过，能够使用UTF-8作为native编码方便的主要还是包的开发者。因为数据一旦进来就是UTF-8，那么开发者就不用再费心思去打各种补丁处理字符编码问题了（非UTF-8编码环境下，各种字符编码都可能不经意的混入到你的字符向量里面，当淤泥中的一束莲花可真难）。
然而，对于用户来讲，他还是会面临：读取的csv格式可能是GBK的，UTF-8的csv格式Excel直接打开是一堆乱码，数据库的编码配置仍然让人头痛…… 但至少一旦读对了，和包相关的字符串错误的可能性还是会少很多了。
真心感谢CRAN Core Member的努力，尤其是Tomas Kalibera，他为推动这个事情肯定耗费了超多的精力。
正是有你们这些无私奉献的神人，R的社区才这么生气勃勃，世界才一天天更美好。
邮件全文
Please note an update concerning the support of UTF-8 as native encoding on Windows, which may at this point be of interest particularly to developers of packages with native code and to R users using R-devel (the development version of R) on Windows:
https://developer.r-project.org/Blog/public/2021/12/07/upcoming-changes-in-r-4.2-on-windows/
The key part is that CRAN will switch the incoming checks of R packages on Windows to a new toolchain targeting UCRT on Monday, December 13.
It may take up to several days for all systems to synchronize and during this time, it may be difficult to build R-devel on Windows from source or to install packages. After the switch, the snapshot R-devel builds and binary package builds provided by CRAN will be built using the new toolchain for UCRT. These new builds will use UTF-8 as the native encoding on recent Windows.
These builds will be incompatible with the previous builds for MSVCRT and installed/binary packages will be incompatible as well. The recommended/simplest course of action for R-devel users is to uninstall the old build of R-devel, RTools, delete the old package libraries, and then install the new versions.
Checks of CRAN packages with the new toolchain have been running since March with results available on CRAN pages. By now, most packages are working, but some packages using native (C, C++, Fortran) code still have to be updated. The Winbuilder service and R-hub support the new toolchain, there is also support/example for using github actions. The builds of R-devel and CRAN (and recommended binary packages) with the new toolchain are available regularly since March.
I’ve created patches for CRAN (and required Bioconductor packages) which are installed automatically at package installation time by R. This feature will be also in R-devel after the switch and will be used temporarily to give package authors more time to fix their packages. Uwe Ligges, other CRAN team members and I have also been in touch with some package authors, providing advice how to fix their packages, when the issues required more explanation. I am prepared to help the remaining authors as well if needed.
Please see the blog post and materials linked from there for more details and feel free to ask questions.