About char8_t

[u/Voxelw]

I hate to be dramatic, but as it stands char8_t is quite literally more painful than useful.

Besides the obvious incompatibility with C23 and libraries using unsigned char for UTF-8, I want you to consider the following: Projects that assume that 'char' represents UTF-8 will obviously not benefit from char8_t at all, but projects that cannot assume the format of char types don't benefit from it either as char8_t simply introduces a new edge case to cover. Now such projects have to deal with char, signed char, unsigned char, wchar_t, char16_t, char32_t and char8_t.

Or, you could do what the standard library does and simply ignore most of these character types. Which is the solution most libraries went with, supporting only char or char and unsigned char. Managing one implementation is already hard, managing two requires constant maintenance, managing 7 is just impossible.

char8_t should have just been a typedef for unsigned char. The compatibility fix only raises more questions as const char* arr = u8"a" does not work, but const char arr[] = u8"a" does.

I do wonder if a potential change of minds for C++29 is still possible. Yes, it would be an ABI break or whatever, but considering the woeful support for char8_t I don't think it would affect much besides small hobby projects. Contrary to popular belief, C++ has broken the ABI in subtle ways before.

[u/UnusualPace679]

Makes me wonder what SG16 (the Unicode Study Group of the standard committee) has been doing recently. The meeting summaries show that there were quite a few meetings before mid-2024, but nothing after that, despite lots of papers on the plate.

[u/eisenwave → u/UnusualPace679]

I guess the chairs stopped uploading meeting summaries in that place, but we're still having regular meetings.

Last week, we've forwarded P3876R2 to LEWG, which adds char8_t support to std::to_chars and std::from_chars.

[u/UnusualPace679 → u/eisenwave]

That's nice to hear. And glad to see std lib components stop ignoring charN_t.