[boost] [nowide] review

Subject: [boost] [nowide] review
From: Andrzej Krzemienski (akrzemi1_at_[hidden])
Date: 2017-06-19 21:28:36

Hi All.
This is a review of Boost.Nowide library.

I am not really familiar with the problem. I used to do trivial tasks with
files on Windows, but they were always ASCII, so the problems solved by
Boost.Nowide never affected me. I am also not fa,iliar with the problems of
converting from Windows encoding (*WTF* seems like the right choice of
name) to UTF-8.

I have read the documentation, and got some additional information from the
author. I have downloaded the library and have run a toy program that plays
with names that cannot be encoded in a single code-page. I am testing on
Windows 7, MinGW, GCC 6.3, with -std=c++03. Compilation and linking works
fine. Tests work fine too. Then, I tried the same example with normal
`std::ifstream` and it did not work on Unicode file names and strings,
which conforms that Boost.Nowide solves an existing problem.

DESIGN: clear, logical, intuitive.
IMPLEMENTATION: I did not look at.
DOCUMENTATION: clear.
POTENTIAL USEFULNESS: as specified in the docs, if you want to do things
with multilingual strings in a platform independent way, you need a library
like this.

I vote to *ACCEPT* the library. I may not be qualified enough (the manager
will weigh my vote), but the desctiption of the library, as well as the
replies from Artyom convince me that the library addresses the problem in
the right way and is reliable.

Artyom, thanks for sharing this library, and submitting it for review.

One minor thing. In th be docs (http://cppcms.com/files/nowide/html/) we
read:
boost::nowide::widen
<http://cppcms.com/files/nowide/html/namespaceboost_1_1nowide.html#a6baacc1bb80c134a2ce37f13977b5500>
returns std::string.

I thing is thsould be std::wstring?

Regards,
&rzej;