Type agnosticism, data structures and C

/prog/, I've been working on a C library with basic data structures and useful functions, and have implemented things like doubly-linked lists and vectors and so on. Now I'm working on Unicode-based string support. Here's my issue.

I've implemented type agnosticism on the vector type using void pointers (not preprocessor macros), so I want to use the vector type to represent a string. Each Unicode codepoint is an int32_t. Of course, I don't want to have to allocate four bytes on the heap for each codepoint, then point to that from each vector element; that's utterly stupid. On the other hand, doing typecasts to shove an integer in the void * type is kludgy and works very poorly, often requiring double explicit casts; once to expand/shrink the type's size, then once more to explicitly cast to a pointer or back.

How can I solve my issues and use my vector type for strings?

>>12
Calling yourself the best doesn't provide credibility. Also, my entire library is valid ANSI C89, save for the requirement of C99's stdint.h, so your 'achievement' isn't all that extraordinary. Also, preprocessor macros are for faggots.