opening wide character string paths in memory-mapped file

[Jim Park <jim@…>]

Without support for wide character string paths, we cannot easily open files with Unicode paths in Windows. This makes interprocess/file_mapping practically unusable for Windows programming. A suggestion might be to abstract out the use of raw strings for paths by using filesystem.

Without the fix, we are using Win32 API to open memory-mapped files and forking the code for other platforms.

[Andrey Semashev]

I second this request, although not in relation to file_mapping but to windows_shared_memory. I have my local code using wide-character Windows API everywhere and windows_shared_memory is the only place where I cannot do that.

Another rationale for moving away from the ANSI APIs is that they are not available on all Windows versions. They also use the unspecified ANSI code page to convert multibyte strings to UTF-16 (in my code I use UTF-8 for multibyte strings).