implement mbtowc directly, not as a wrapper for mbrtowc

the interface contract for mbtowc admits a much faster implementation
than mbrtowc can achieve; wrapping mbrtowc with an extra call frame
only made the situation worse.

since the regex implementation uses mbtowc already, this change should
improve regex performance too. it may be possible to improve
performance in other places internally by switching from mbrtowc to
mbtowc.