It's quite common to use wide character strings to support Unicode in C and C++.

In C++ this often means using std::wstring and std::wcout. Maybe these are more common than wprintf? In any case the console output breaks as Py_Initialize hijacks the host application's standard output streams which sounds quite illegitimate to me.

I understand that Python isn't designed for embedding and it would be a lot of work to fix it, but I would still encourage everyone to take a look at this bug. For me, this was one of the reasons I ultimately had to decide against using Python as my application's scripting language, which is a shame.