Is that getting wchar_t to be 32bit on win32 a good idea for compatible with Unix world by implement posix layer on win32 API?

["罗勇刚(Yonggang Luo) " <luoyonggang-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org>]

Two solution:
1、Change the width of wchar_t to 16 bit, I guess that would broken a
lot of things that exist on Win32 world.
2、Or we should preserve wchar_t to be 16 bit on win32, and add the
char16_t and char32_t
variant API for all API that have both narrow and wide version?


I support for the second one, even if the second option is not
applicable. the first option would cause a lot problems, the first
thing is all Windows API use wchar_t and dependent on the wchar_t to
be 2 byte width.  Second is, there is open source libraries that
dependent the de fac·to that wchar_t to be 16 bit, such as Qt,
Git(maybe).
Almost exist open source libraries that already ported to Win32 are
dependent the the fact wchar_t to be 16 bit,  cygwin is also discussed
if getting wchar_t to be 32bit on win32

https://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2011-02/msg00037.html


> think there is no one would use
>>>>> wchar_t for cross text processing, cause, on some system, wchar_t is
>>>>> just 8bit  width!
>>>>
>>>> anybody would use wchar_t who cares about standard conformant
>>>> implementations.
>>>>
>>>> non-standard broken platforms may get an unmaintained #ifdef
>>>> as usual..
>>>
>>> I think we (and midipix) have a different perspective from Yonggang
>>> Luo on portable development. Our view is that you write to a POSIX (or
>>> nearly-POSIX) target with fully working Unicode support and fix the
>>> small number of targets (i.e. just Windows) that don't already provide
>> Small is relative, if counting the distribution count, well, Unix wins.
>>> these things. Yonggang Luo's perspective seems to be more of a
>>> traditional Windows approach with #ifdef and lots of OS-specific code,
>>> but just making the Windows branch of the #ifdefs less hideous than it
>>> was before. :)
>> If getting wchar_t to be 32 bit on win32, then truly will be a lot of
>> #ifdef, I am not so sure
>> if you have experience on Win32 API development, I hope we discussing
>> the problems in a
>>   more objective way.
>>
>
> One primary objective of code portability and posix-compatibility layer
> for win32 is to _remove_ the need for OS-specific code-paths. A wchar_t
> that is anything short (no pun intended) of a 32-bit integer will render
> it impossible to build out of the box many pieces of commonly-used
> software, including, but not limited to musl libc, the curses library,
> and anything that expects wchar_t to cover the entire unicode range.
>
> As for your suggested framework: there are currently at least three
> compilers that can produce optimized code for the target platform (gcc,
> clang, and cparser), and which work very well with most open-source
> software out there. As an aside, if you are interested in an 8-byte long
> on 64-bit windows then an open-source compiler is probably your only
> option. To compile musl with msvc, on the other hand, you'd have to make
> so many changes to the source code that you might as well write your own
> libc from scratch. To see why, please attempt to compile some ten or
> fifteen core libc headers (stdio.h, unistd.h, etc.) with msvc. If that
> goes well (spoiler: it won't), then the next step would be to compile a
> subset of the source files (src/pthread or src/stdio, for instance) and
> remove any remaining obstacles.
>
> m.
>
>
>>>
>>> Rich
>>
>>
>>
>
>