Keith MacDonald wrote:
I have an MP3 player with a 40G hard drive, which puts your concerns about a 2.4G library into perspective.
Not quite. Whenever you do network install (which I happened to do), or update packages (which is being done regularly on Linux boxes here), the size matters much more that for local install.
That's got to be a secondary issue, compared with the requirements for convenience and functionality, when designing a library.
This issue should be considered, at least. Speaking about convenience and functionality, what's wrong with single path class which can accept both narrow and wide strings?
Regarding the overhead of narrow to wide conversion, that's what any Windows app suffers, every time it calls a Win32 API with a narrow string parameter. Inside the kernel, everything is in Unicode (ignoring Win9x/ME).
I know; do you mean this is an argument in favour of single implementation (that's what windows kernel does), or two separate implementations? - Volodya