I'm aware of the conversions, unfortunately, you can’t really do any processing before you convert and you can’t (unlike C++) write generic code that works on both types of converted values.

On Unix you get Vec<u8> and on Windows you get an iterator over u16. This is hot garbage, to say the least, if you want to do any kind of processing. I can go into more details, but in C++ you would just be working with std::string and std::wstring, depending on platform, and at least in that case you can hide everything away like this:

    #if defined WIN32
    using OsChar = wchar_t;
    #else
    using OsChar = char;
    #endif

    using OsString = std::basic_string<OsChar>;

This is only the beginning, but you can see how the C++ version is much easier to work with, even though it doesn’t hide the problem from you.

Note that I’m not advocating that you make everything in your code into OsString, just that it’s common to need to do some small amount of manipulation of OsString and Rust makes this much harder than it should be.

With Rust you can also convert to `Vec<T>` where T is either `u8` or `u16` and use generics to work on any. ️

And there are probably handful of libraries that would help with all that too. Also - whatever convenient functionality you might want, can be added in the future without issues. Hardly a language flaw - just a minor unimplemented functionality.

> With Rust you can also convert to `Vec<T>` where T is either `u8` or `u16` and use generics to work on any.

That’s a very cumbersome way of doing things. I would love to see an illustration. It also involves a ton of conversions: if want to parse a command-line flag which contains a file path, it would go: wchar_t -> OsString -> Vec<u16> -> OsString -> wchar_t. It also makes it difficult to use Rust APIs in a more or less idiomatic way.

> Hardly a language flaw - just a minor unimplemented functionality.

It’s a flaw in the standard library, not the language. When you say that it’s minor, all you’re doing is saying, “I don’t care about the things you care about.” That’s not really an argument, just a statement of your own personal opinion.