Adding char* based APIs for Unix

methane · February 20, 2019, 12:53pm

I don’t think so. wchar_t is designed before UTF-8 era.
Using wchar_t in right way on Unix is hard. It is based on locale. mbstowcs may be buggy on some systems.
I don’t want to learn about wchar_t. I don’t want to force young people to learn about wchar_t too.

For example, vim uses Py_SetPythonHome. See this code.

github.com

vim/vim/blob/14816ad6e58336773443f5ee2e4aa9e384af65d2/src/if_python3.c#L874-L887


      
          	if (*p_py3home != NUL)
          	{
          	    size_t len = mbstowcs(NULL, (char *)p_py3home, 0) + 1;
          
          	    /* The string must not change later, make a copy in static memory. */
          	    py_home_buf = (wchar_t *)alloc(len * sizeof(wchar_t));
          	    if (py_home_buf != NULL && mbstowcs(
          			    py_home_buf, (char *)p_py3home, len) != (size_t)-1)
          		Py_SetPythonHome(py_home_buf);
          	}
          #ifdef PYTHON3_HOME
          	else if (mch_getenv((char_u *)"PYTHONHOME") == NULL)
          	    Py_SetPythonHome(PYTHON3_HOME);
          #endif

Strictly speaking, vim should use Py_DecodeLocale instead of mbstowcs here, if I understand the API correctly. But I’m not sure.
This is one example of how embedding Python correctly on Unix is difficult.

path is bytes in Unix. So char* based APIs is simple and easy to configure paths.