Revisiting OsStr and UTF-8 on Windows
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Description
As of Windows 10 build 17035 (stabilized in April 2018 update), all (in reality, most) Windows APIs can be called via the "legacy" narrow-string interfaces (e.g. CreateFileA instead of CreateFileW), but have been updated to be UTF-8 compatible when the codepage is set to UTF-8 (rather than expecting CP-1252 or the non-unicode system character set). It also affects non-suffixed functions like fopen.
I haven't dug in deeply enough to see what the behavior is when the original data is not valid Unicode (e.g. how this intersects with WTF-8), but it does provide some opportunities to unify the behavior between unix and Windows ffi, e.g. using u8 rather than u16 for OsStrExt.
Of course none of this going to be backported to older versions of Windows we would like to continue supporting, so I'm not sure how that would ultimately play with cfg targets, either.
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First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start by investigating Rust's OsStrExt behavior and the Windows narrow-string APIs described in the issue, including invalid Unicode and supported Windows versions. Determine how the proposal would interact with WTF-8 and cfg targets; done requires a settled, implementable approach for unifying Unix and Windows FFI behavior.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- rust
- Domain
- operating-systems
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Needs clarification
- Newbie friendliness
- 25/100