Re: C and C++, promotion, stabilization, migrationFor embedded

On 2024-08-23 23:34:18 +0000, Arne Vajhøj said:

On 8/23/2024 11:32 AM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:

OpenVMS has ~no concept of languages, either. Yeah, the C abd C++ I18N giblets, Java and its own little world, maybe using the existing and older ICU or maybe you ported a newer ICU, and the deprecated Terminal Fallback Facility (TFF) and National (Replacement)  Character Set (NCS) giblets, sure. All of which make things more interesting for apps that want or need to deal with the UTF-8 and post-ASCII world.

 Regarding UTF-8 support, then  my take is that:
 UTF-8 in file names, in usernames, in logicals, in identifiers and in programs/scripts: not really needed.

UTF-8 filenames — poorly documented — already exists and was necessary for a key app or two, though the rendering is ugly.
Working on a system that supports UTF-8 ~everywhere including within the shell and within various languages and apps makes things easier.
Systems that don't provide that support mean more work. It's feasible, but it's work.  Or it gets ignored, or implemented elsewhere.
With the state of TFF, NCS, ICU, and the rest (on OpenVMS), I'd expect that all gets workarounds or hack-arounds, or gets ignored and ANSI / ISO Latin-1 used. That at least until the app gets ported off OpenVMS, or the app gets replaced.

UTF-8 in file content and in databases: very much needed.
 And support for the latter fall in 3 groups:
* JVM languages (Java, Groovy etc.) and I believe Python - does support unicode and can read/write using any encoding including UTF-8
* C, C++, PHP - developer keeps track of what encoding a byte sequence is in but possible to explicit convert encodings
   (C/C++ has wchar_t but it is neither much used nor UTF-8 friendly AFAIK)

Quoth the standard: "The width of wchar_t is compiler-specific and can be as small as 8 bits. Consequently, programs that need to be portable across any C or C++ compiler should not use wchar_t for storing Unicode text."

* the traditional native languages - very little support except what can be done by calling C functions

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