On 23.05.2012 0:41, Walter Bright wrote:
On 5/22/2012 11:11 AM, 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.
First off, I agree that druntime and phobos must not use the A functions
without a very, very good reason.
Right.
Secondly, as a matter of principle, we are not going to fix, improve,
refactor, or re-engineer the Windows API, nor any other operating system
API, nor the C Standard Library, no matter how tempting that may be. The
job of the D interface modules is to simply provide an interface to
them, as thin and direct as possible, without editorial comment. The
user can decide what to use or not use from it.
Again correct. The trick is that the way *A functions are provided is in
fact wrong edit! It signatres are basically saying "hello I'm explicit
Win32 API multi-byte string binding and I accept UTF-8 string " ... WTF?!
The fact that they are horribly outdated is the perfect moment to both
fix the issue and get rid of junk.
--
Dmitry Olshansky
