[Mingw-users] Unicode file names

[Marian C. <ci...@in...>]

Hi,


I've read the posts at http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnu.mingw.user/23536 and http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnu.mingw.user/14517 but I hope I'm missing something.

It seems to me that the only way to access files whose names can't be represented in the 8-bit system locale is to use native Windows functions or some external library. Is that so? (By access I mean fopen(), readdir(), stat(), ifstream, ...)

If that's the case, I wonder what led to the decision to make things this way, since this seems to favor porting from MSVC and other Windows compilers to GCC, or creating DLLs that are compatible with those compilers, while making it a pain to write stand-alone applications that work on both Windows and Linux/UNIX. Was this the intended goal? (Or perhaps there's a higher goal that I fail to see.)

(I'm using MinGW 3.4.2 / 3.4.5 and switching is currently not an option, but did anything change in 4.4.0?)

Thanks