utfcpp VS dstep

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).

You might also be interested in dstep, a tool that can generate D bindings from C header files.

- C, Objective-C = https://github.com/jacob-carlborg/dstep

> its test blocks make unit testing trivial to integrate.

Again, D also has this:

https://tour.dlang.org/tour/en/gems/unittesting

  void main() {

It's a C lib, generating bindings is super easy https://github.com/jacob-carlborg/dstep

There is no need to maintain bindings that can be automatically generated, wich can easily get outdated if the C project is actively developped

Anyways, someone went a ahead and updated it: https://github.com/Soaku/raylib-d

Not quite as seamless as Zig, but dstep is an external program that leverages libclang to do the same thing (and generates a D module for you), as well as e.g., smartly convert #define macros to inlineable templates functions :)

https://github.com/jacob-carlborg/dstep