libiconv anyone ?

[Florian Weimer]

* John Emmas:

> On 28/09/2020 13:06, Florian Weimer wrote:
>> We have an implementation of the iconv interfaces, but it is really
>> tightly integrated with glibc and fairly advanced POSIX functionality
>> such as dlopen.  I doubt it is feasible to extract the implementation
>> for building on Windows.
>
> Thanks Florian - I'm curious to know what libiconv does.  It seems to
> get used quite extensively (libxml / fontconfig / gettext etc) but
> I've never been sure what it does.

It provides character set conversion facilities.  It seems that Windows
has similar functionality in the form of the WideCharToMultiByte and
MultiByteToWideChar functions.

I just realized that another obstacle to for porting iconv to Windows is
that our implementation assumes that wchar_t is 32 bits, while Windows
uses UCS-2 or UTF-16 extensively (so it leans towards 16 bits for wide
characters).

> Also... are libc and glibc the same thing? (that's something else I've
> always wondered about !!)

“libc” is sometimes used to refer to the non-compiler parts of a C
implementation, that is, the C run-time library, so something like
MSVCRT.DLL.  Even on Linux, there are several different C run-time
libraries in wide use, and glibc is just one of them.

Thanks,
Florian
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