On 22.05.2012 22:11, Denis Shelomovskij wrote:
Since Win9x isn't supported any more why do we have ASCII WinAPI
functions in druntime's core.sys.windows.windows (and, possibly, other
places)?
Reasons against *A functions:
* using of every such function is unsafe (with really seldom exceptions
like LoadLibraryA("ntdll")) because inability to encode non-ASCII
characters to OEM encoding will almost always give unpredictable results
for programmer (simple test: you, reader, what will happen?);
* in D it's too easy to make a mistake by passing UTF-8 string pointer
to such function because D has no string types other than UTF and
elimination of such function is the only solution unless ASCII string
type is created
* it performs worse because Windows has to convert ASCII string to
UTF-16 first
And yes, druntime already has encoding bugs because of using such
functions.
Yes, let them burn! Burn, burn, burn!
Seriously.
For those that are bend on compatibility, *A functions also are:
- security disasters
- limited in more then just one way: 256 max path, and so on and so forth
And last but not least:
- *W were supported on Win98+ Second Edition with official addon -
Unicode Layer for Windows ;)
Not to mention the OEM encoding were never supported properly by D.
P.S.
Let's finally solve encoding problems that should be solved 10 years
ago! By the way, Git+TurtoiseGit still has encoding problems on Windows
and it is awful (see its changelog).
--
Dmitry Olshansky
