It's not in the standard specifically, no, but no implementation is dumb enough to ban it. If you have a strong over unsigned char, you can then specialize char_traits for it by just doing

template <>

struct char_traits<u8char> : char_traits<unsigned char> {};

 

This requires that there's an implicit conversion from u8char -> unsigned char, which I would imagine is safe enough unless you really care about overload resolution. If overload resolution is a problem, I would suggest either biting the bullet of a full implementation, or throwing out the strong typedef altogether and just using "unsigned char" for your u8 type anyhow.

Sincerely,

ThePhD