> This has been discussed when we did JEP 400: UTF-8 by Default and > decided not to do it, mainly because it affects filename/path encoding. > Changing `sun.jnu.encoding` apart from Windows system encoding will make > apps not being able to access those files/directories (e.g. home > directory) if the path/name contains characters with different encodings.
Based on grepping the source, it looks like the JDK (almost?) exclusively uses the -W Windows APIs to interface with the file system, with the active code page only being relevant for the internal conversion between Java strings and platform UTF-16 strings through `MultiByteToWideChar` and `WideCharToMultiByte` (via `CP_ACP`). If my understanding is correct, wouldn't it be an option to conditionally replace all usages of `CP_ACP` with `CP_UTF8` while simultaneously setting `sun.jnu.encoding` to UTF-8? I envision this as being equivalent to adding `<activeCodePage>UTF-8</activeCodePage>` to the Java launchers app manifest, but in a way that's toggleable and thus doesn't break applications that don't handle charsets other than the codepage they have been running with so far. I'm still trying to wrap my head around all the implications this may have, so apologies if I'm missing any. I mostly want to make sure that I understand what exactly could go wrong if anyone were to try this. The upside is definitely there.
