Re: What happened to Boost.Nowide?

From: Peter Dimov (pdimov_at_[hidden])
Date: 2020-01-07 23:34:27

Gavin Lambert wrote:

> The main problem though is that once you start allowing transcoding of any 
> kind, it's a slippery slope to other conversions that can make lossy 
> changes (such as applying different canonicalisation formats, or 
> adding/removing layout codepoints such as RTL markers).

There's no such slippery slope, no canonicalization, no adding or removing 
anything. You just WTF-8 encode whatever Windows gives you, and WTF-8 decode 
the path before passing it to Windows.

> Also, if you read the WTF-8 spec, it notes that it is not legal to 
> directly concatenate two WTF-8 strings (you either have to convert it back 
> to UCS-16 first, or execute some special handling for the trailing 
> characters of the first string), which immediately renders it a poor 
> choice for a path storage format.

Do you have a specific example in which concatenation won't work for the use 
outlined above? Because I can't think of any.