On Tuesday, 1 April 2025 13:42:27 Mountain Daylight Time Tymi via Std-
Proposals wrote:
> Sure, but we are talking about std::wprint and not std::u16print and I
> assumed they wanted to say "format_string should support wide strings".
> Maybe I'm wrong in this, but yes, I'm not defending char16_t in any case
> here

I am.

char16_t is far more useful than wchar_t because it's the same everywhere.
wchar_t is only useful on Windows; everywhere else it's legacy dead weight.
Other OSes may not have low-level UTF-16 API, but they do have mid- and high-
level ones, including Apple's Cocoa and Carbon APIs, JDK interfaces (including
Android), and ICU. And then there's of course Qt, which uses UTF-16
extensively and exclusively, so UTF-16 is highly relevant for C++.

That's why I am saying <format> should support char16_t before any other
character type. This solves the formatting on Windows by the simple expediency
of reinterpret_cast, while the formatting on all other platforms supported by
mainstream Standard Libraries is a well-known UTF16-to-UTF8 conversion.

The way I see it, there are only two useful character types: char and
char16_t. (char8_t came too late to be useful, so it's as useful as char32_t
for all I care)

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago (AT) macieira.info - thiago (AT) kde.org
  Principal Engineer - Intel DCAI Platform & System Engineering