Note that cutting out individual codepoints – or even worse bytes – from a string can cause the string to corrupt. Strangs are made out of graphemes, which can each be made out of multiple unicode codepoints, which can each be made out of multiple unicode surrogate codepoints, which can each be made out of multiple bytes. The wide string functions from the C (and C++) runtime library do not apply a normalization when transforming the input, and therefore will output surrogate codepoints if surrogates were used in the input, which is very common.

Attempting to print a string that contains broken unicode can cause undefined behaviour due to bugs in the implementations: Over here, I have Qt misrendering the complete string, Java same, Win32 leaking memory and misrendering all characters past the broken one and pangocairo entering an infinite loop on a number of sample inputs the other day.

Instead, if a string needs modification, it has to be modified on grapheme level.

Thank you.

No. The X-Plane SDK API bindings will remain pure C, even though the underlying implementation has always been C++ internally; we do this so that other languages can link more easily.

I am referring to trying to keep small parts of the scenery tools/WED code base C-only. We’re going to accept that scenery tools is all c++ and replace the C string handling.

Please clarify, are you talking about the X-Plane API being rewritten in C++? I really kind of enjoyed it being in C, since I’m using it from a C plugin.

I don’t usually use the term “beautifully” with anything Qt related. 🙂

There were a few reasons:
1. We wrote our abstraction first, then others brought in QT, so by the time it was available the work was already done.
2. I am not a huge QT fan, and wasn’t looking to have the QT tool chain on Mac/Windows.

Since Qt is already an abstraction for all OS and window managers (Linux, Windows, OS X), why not use it for all and drop your own abstractions?

Why use Qt only for Linux? It solves the crossplatform problem beautifully.

You mean WED?

– Qt is used for the Linux abstraction of the OS and window manager.
– Win32 is used for the Win32 abstraction of the OS and window manager.
– ObjC/Cocoa is used for the OS X abstraction of the OS and window manager. How could you LEAVE THIS OFF in your list of scary – it’s the most scary part of all. 🙂
– The plain C is legacy from a million years ago when I thought it would be useful for some low level utility APIs to be pure C so they could be compiled into a wider range of projects.

Since no one really uses that last capability we now have a policy of rewriting to C++ and removing C string handling whenever possible, to minimize C string face-palms. But the boundary with the Win32 API is one of those areas where we just have to do it right.