Re: 16-bit wchar_t on Windows and Cygwin

[Bruno Haible <bruno@clisp.org>]

Hi Eric,

> I was asking:
> 
> should wwchar_t (or xwchar_t, but not xchar_t) be 2-bytes on cygwin, but
> unlike the POSIX definition of wchar_t being always 1 character per
> unit, the new type is explicitly documented as being multi-unit on some
> platforms but with sane semantics
> 
> or should it always be 4-bytes, where conversion from wchar_t to
> wwchar_t requires some efforts, and where the new type must be used
> everywhere (which means wrapping a lot of APIs), but where you can once
> again assume POSIX semantics of 1 character per unit, simplifying life
> of callers at the expense of converting to the new type

In the first case we wouldn't need a new type.

The plan is the second alternative. The goal is *not* to have to extend
each of quotearg.c, regcomp.c, mbchar.h, wc.c, etc. to handle UTF-16
explicitly with #ifdefs, more variables, and more logic.

> if it works out, should we also add wwchar_t natively into cygwin? 

More and more Unix platforms offer only UTF-8 locales. One can predict
that in 10 years, all Unix platforms will offer only UTF-8 locales. At this
point wchar_t will be UCS-4 on all these platforms (except AIX).

The mbrtoc32 function from the C1X API that you pointed to will then be
equivalent to mbrtowwc.

So, you can view 'wwchar_t' as a temporary measure that will bridge the
gap between the ANSI C Amd. 1 API and the C1X API.

Bruno
-- 
In memoriam Carl Friedrich Goerdeler <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Goerdeler>

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