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On Windows, unless you really, really, really have to support Windows 9x/ME you ignore the A functions and exclusively use the W variants. You then also don't n

by ygra 5y ago

On Windows, unless you really, really, really have to support Windows 9x/ME you ignore the A functions and exclusively use the W variants. You then also don't need the macro magic to switch, as your code doesn't have to work on both Windows NT and 9x (which is the only reason to use that macro magic). And a difference between "UTF-8" and arbitrary bytes is insofar sensible in that you can perform text operations on the former, but not on the latter. Unicode cannot be treated as just a byte stream as soon as you want to do something to the content (or just for very narrow circumstances).

jstimpfle 5y ago
In fact I use exclusively the A variants as far as possible, because anything else is really bad engineering, as I've explained. Even Microsoft has started to acknowledge this, and whereas the A variants had been implemented as wrappers around the W variants before, I heard they started to reverse that and started recommending the A functions. See here for example: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design/globalizing/use-utf8-code-page https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design/globali... If you browse around various documentation, you'll see contradicting statements which variants are recommended, which I take as another sign that the idea of making a distinction on the type level is simply a bad idea. As to the macros, yes, if you give the A or W explicitly, you won't need the macro setting that translates the unspecific names to the A or W variants. And as said, the macros aren't a good idea anyway, as it's still extremely hard to properly abstract the distinction (the types are different sizes!!), so code is generally tied to a specific choice either way. > Unicode cannot be treated as just a byte stream as soon as you want to do something to the content (or just for very narrow circumstances). It can be stored as a byte stream. Whenever you work with the data, you might need to operate on transformed representations - 32-bit codepoints, or larger combinations, or even more complicated stuff like words, sentences, paragraphs, tags, whatever it needs to do the task as done. This is programming, you transform data to achieve things. What I say is that it's stupid to make a distinction on the type level between things that are entirely the same thing in memory, and that are going to be used for the same things. It's stupid because it unnecessarily create incompatibilities between data and introduces unnecessary "conversions" / copies and requires more code.

by ygra 5y ago

jstimpfle 5y ago

In fact I use exclusively the A variants as far as possible, because anything else is really bad engineering, as I've explained. Even Microsoft has started to acknowledge this, and whereas the A variants had been implemented as wrappers around the W variants before, I heard they started to reverse that and started recommending the A functions. See here for example: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design/globalizing/use-utf8-code-page https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design/globali... If you browse around various documentation, you'll see contradicting statements which variants are recommended, which I take as another sign that the idea of making a distinction on the type level is simply a bad idea. As to the macros, yes, if you give the A or W explicitly, you won't need the macro setting that translates the unspecific names to the A or W variants. And as said, the macros aren't a good idea anyway, as it's still extremely hard to properly abstract the distinction (the types are different sizes!!), so code is generally tied to a specific choice either way. > Unicode cannot be treated as just a byte stream as soon as you want to do something to the content (or just for very narrow circumstances). It can be stored as a byte stream. Whenever you work with the data, you might need to operate on transformed representations - 32-bit codepoints, or larger combinations, or even more complicated stuff like words, sentences, paragraphs, tags, whatever it needs to do the task as done. This is programming, you transform data to achieve things. What I say is that it's stupid to make a distinction on the type level between things that are entirely the same thing in memory, and that are going to be used for the same things. It's stupid because it unnecessarily create incompatibilities between data and introduces unnecessary "conversions" / copies and requires more code.