Re: [boost] Review of Nowide

Subject: Re: [boost] Review of Nowide
From: Artyom Beilis (artyom.beilis_at_[hidden])
Date: 2017-06-20 08:00:56

On Tue, Jun 20, 2017 at 6:44 AM, Chris Glover via Boost
<boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> The following is my review of the proposed Boost.Nowide library.

> One thing I'm not sure about is if the overlap between the fstream
> implementations in filesystem and nowide is necessary. It seems to me that
> if I set filesystem to be nowide aware (via
> boost::nowide::nowide_filesystem) then there's little reason for the nowide
> versions of the stream objects to exist, other than possibly eliminating
> one string copy on non-windows platforms and avoiding the filesystem
> dependency (and maybe those are good enough reasons).
>

The reason nowide implemented fstream is because filesystem::fstream
uses internally the default std::basic_filebuf thus relays on std library
to provide filebuf::open(wchar_t const *).

Also it works OK for MSVC, MinGW libstdc++ does not provide wchar_t
interface. For filesytem the fix is far from trivial as requires implementation
of filebuf so nowide implemented one.

> - What is your evaluation of the documentation?
>
> The documentation is clear and complete, but I think it needs to explain at
> the top that the library does not present a uniform encoding for strings.
> This is discussed in the documentation near the end, under "Q & A", but I
> think it should be near the top. A suggestion is to add a section called
> "What Boost.Nowide is *not*" directly under the section titled "What is
> Boost.Nowide", otherwise I expect some users to be surprised.
>

I think it is very good point.

>
> Under MSYS, one test failed (Fail: Error boost::nowide::cin.putback(c) in
> test_iostream.cpp:17 main), but I haven't had a chance to look into why
> yet.
>
> All of the tests passed on the other platforms.
>

Ok I hope once I have full test suite of Boost suite it will be easier
to find the stuff.

>
> Yes. I am already using it and expect I will be using it a lot more going
> forward.
>

Thank You very much for the review

> -- chris
>

Artyom