Date: Wed, 29 Dec 2021 12:11:01 -0500
From: Christopher Wellons <wellons@nullprogram.com>
To: Ron Yorston <rmy@pobox.com>
Cc: ~skeeto/public-inbox@lists.sr.ht
Subject: busybox-w32 and UTF-8
Message-ID: <20211229171101.l5doxlbr5jysfy53@nullprogram.com>
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Hey, Ron. I recently learned about a relatively new Windows feature to set 
the "Active Code Page" for processes to UTF-8 when they're started, which 
causes most ANSI Win32 encode Unicode strings as UTF-8, notably including 
GetCommandLineA() and CreateFileA(). Since every Windows C and C++ runtime 
hooks up the to the ANSI API, this means C and C++ programs are upgraded 
to support Unicode the same way they do on every other platform, and 
Windows doesn't require so much special handling. They get UTF-8-encoded 
arguments and can access Unicode paths via UTF-8. Even busybox-w32 can 
take advantage of this, at least to some extent.

In case you're interested, I elaborated on it in this issue:
https://github.com/skeeto/w64devkit/issues/15

Unfortunately, this does not cover ReadConsoleA() nor ReadFile() on a 
console.