utfcpp VS RIIR

std::string is simply a string of bytes, so can already contain utf-8 encoded text. The only problem is when you want to interact with OS (Windows) API and other library APIs that don't expect utf-8 and when you need to count number of characters etc. For that you can look into existing libraries, e.g. the official Unicode ICU or whatever you can find that others have made, e.g.: https://github.com/nemtrif/utfcpp

Suffice it to say, this is a mess. However, there are libraries that make this easier.

> I've always tried as much as possible to treat strings as just opaque data and never look into them, which tends to work well, but in some domains you really need to look at and massage the characters/codepoints/grapheme clusters, and the lack of a first-citizen UTF-8-aware string type is, I think, a bit unfortunate in this day and age.

You don't need a UTF-8 type for that, you just need routines that handle UTF-8 strings, like utfcpp (https://github.com/nemtrif/utfcpp).

It was, imo, inflated by the comments pointing to the RiiR sentiments, not the comments to that effect itself. Even repositories 'collecting' such instances (e.g. https://github.com/ansuz/RIIR) are largely not collections of making anyone to change their own software but just projects that happen to be written in Rust. (these out-of-scope issues are not being tagged appropriately). Overhyped controversy by all sides.

Dunno what news you have missed but there's entire internet brigades dedicated sorely to spam projects with "rewrite it in rust". There's even a repo documenting this.

The OP post in the link references https://transitiontech.ca/random/RIIR (Rewrite it in Rust) as a meme.

Yes, one can hope, but I wouldn't bet on it and I wouldn't suggest to RIIR. I don't want to be that person that pops up uncalled for and asks to Rewrite It In Rust. One might think "Oh it is just one additional issue to the ~2.2k already opened mypy issues" if they have at all realized that there are that many open issues.

It's died down a bit now, but there is/was a non-trivial amount of stupidity from Rust advocates whenever someone ran into a memory problem with C/C++ to "re-write it in rust" or to just rewrite things in general. (IE https://transitiontech.ca/random/RIIR)

Or even better, RIIR the Windows kernel!

What is it with people asking for rust rewrites of Xorg this week? https://github.com/ansuz/RIIR/issues/83

The second language is Rust, and I went with that partly because rewriting C in Rust is a meme in itself, and in part because it was much easier to think of how to nicely fix that bug in Rust than it was in C (just add a = to the range to be end-inclusive).