Comment by klodolph

Yeah, I avoided talking about Windows which isn’t UTF-16 but “int16 string” the same way Unix filenames are int8 strings.

IMO the differences with Windows are such that I’m much more unhappy with WTF-8. There’s a lot that sucks about C++ but at least I can do something like

  #if _WIN32
  using pathchar = wchar_t;
  constexpr pathchar sep = L'\\';
  #else
  using pathchar = char;
  constexpr pathchar sep = '/';
  #endif
  using pathstring = std::basic_string<pathchar>;

Mind you this sucks for a lot of reasons, one big reason being that you’re directly exposed to the differences between path representations on different operating systems. Despite all the ways that this (above) sucks, I still generally prefer it over the approaches of Go or Rust.