Windows dynamic linking depends on the active code page

As someone who has worked on Windows for a long time, the title was entirely unsurprising. Widening or narrowing always uses the current codepage.

If a name contains values beyond ASCII — technically out of spec

I'm not sure what spec it's referring to, but this is normal and expected for files in non-English systems.

Such tools often incorrectly assume UTF-8, which is what motivated this article.

Those tools are likely to be from the *nix world, where UTF-8 is far more common for the multibyte encoding --- but even there, you can have different codepages; and I have worked on Linux systems using CP1252 and 932 before.

This is a neat hack, and very well written. I felt a bit of nostalgia looking at the (classical) cpp flex to avoid repeating an identifier

   #define X(s) #s
   #define S(s) X(s)

I got the chance to evaluate vendors for a huge enterprise because I was assisting their CTO. I vividly remember the sales guy who flew from Redmond to pitch the shiny new Hyper-V virtual machine platform Microsoft had just developed to compete head-to-head with VMware.

“I tried the beta and it couldn’t install successfully if I set my regional options to en-AU.”

“Umm… that’s just a cosmetic issue.”

“It’s a hypervisor kernel, it is going to host tens of thousands of our most critical applications and it crashes if I change one of only three things it asks during setup. My confidence is not super high right now.”

Etc…

I got the impression that Microsoft is used to selling to PHBs based on the look of shock on the guy’s face when I told him that I not only installed the product, but benchmarked it too for good measure.

Is this what is meant when people say that Windows doesn't have stable APIs? I've not programmed windows/desktop software and have often been confused as to why if you're writing an assembly program, you have to use at least a little C if you want to make Windows system calls[1]. The compiler must be compiling the call into "something" so can't you just write that "something" directly in assembly?

[1]: The classic example being Chris Sawyer writing nearly all of Rollercoaster Tycoon in x86 assembly but requiring just enough C for the system calls.

The worst thing that Windows has that's tied to your locale is case sensitivity for filenames. You can have two filenames be created under one locale, change your locale, then the filenames aren't considered different anymore.

That has strong “let’s put this in as a temporary solution, we will fix it later” energy.