On Saturday, 22 September 2018 at 21:04:04 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> On Saturday, 22 September 2018 at 20:46:27 UTC, Jonathan Marler wrote:
>> Decided to play around with this for a bit.  Made a "proof of concept" library:
>
> I suggest using GetFullPathNameW instead of GetCurrentDirectory + manual path appending / normalization. It's also what CoreFX seems to be doing.

Yes that allows the library to avoid calling buildNormalizedPath.  I've implemented and pushed this change.  This change also exposed a weakness in the Appender interface and I've created a bug for it:

https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19259

The problem is there's no way to extend the length of the data in an appender if you don't use the `put` functions.  So when I call GetFullPathNameW function to populate the data (like the .NET CoreFX implementation does) I can't extend the length.

On 09/22/2018 04:46 PM, Jonathan Marler wrote:
> 
> Decided to play around with this for a bit.  Made a "proof of concept" library:
> 
> https://github.com/marler8997/longfiles
> 
> It's just a prototype/exploration on the topic.  It allows you to include "stdx.longfiles" instead of "std.file" which will enable the conversion in every call, or you can import "stdx.longfiles : toLongPath" and use that on filenames passed to std.file.

Cool! Will have to take a closer look and try it out.

Regarding this: "TODO: what should be done about the MS-DOS FAT filesystem?"...

First of all, FAT16 can still be fully-used with the current interfaces anyway - it's just that if you attempt anything FAT16 doesn't support, the error you get will come from the OS rather than a D lib. But *unlike* the non-`\\?\` path issues, there really isn't anything here that needs to be worked around, or that even *can* be sensibly worked around.

Besides, FAT16 is a rarely-used, long-since-outdated legacy format. Its successor, FAT32 has been around for more than 20 years, and I'm not aware of anything more recent than the 3.5" floppy that uses it by default. I'd say it safely falls into the category of "Too much of an esoteric special-case to be worth requiring that special support be added in the main 'path of least resistance' interface (as long as there's nothing preventing the user from handling it on their own if they really need to.)"