On Wednesday, 19 September 2018 at 05:49:41 UTC, Nick Sabalausky
(Abscissa) wrote:
[...]
Someone mentioned in this thread that .NET runtime does do the
long-path workaround automatically. One thing we could do is copy
EXACTLY what C# is doing.
The rationale being that:
- .NET is made by Microsoft
- The Windows API's filesystem implementation is made by Microsoft
- Given that these two are made by the same party, it's
reasonable to assume that the .NET authors authoritatively "knew
what they were doing" when implementing the workaround.
- The algorithm used by .NET is very likely to be supported by
the API (even future implementations), as well as third-party
implementations of the API.
However, there are still drawbacks to this:
- There is still the matter of overhead (one OS API call
(GetCurrentDirectory) and at least one GC allocation (for the
current directory buffer)).
- Using paths longer than MAX_PATH is an exceptional situation.
Putting the workaround in the main code path penalizes 99.9% of
use cases.
- The registry switch in newer Windows versions removes the need
for this workaround, so systems with it enabled are penalized as
well.
- There is still the matter regarding special filenames, as well
as whether the expected behavior is really to succeed and create
paths inaccessible to most software, instead of failing.
