[SG16-Unicode] Draft SG16 direction paper

Tom Honermann tom at honermann.net
Mon Oct 8 04:21:27 CEST 2018


On 10/07/2018 06:32 PM, Victor Zverovich wrote:
> > Existing programs depend on the ability to dynamically change the 
> execution encoding (within reason) in order for a server process to 
> concurrently serve multiple clients with different locale settings.
>
> This seems like a very weird use case because it effectively limits 
> server to processing requests on one thread, since as mentioned 
> elsewhere in the document per-thread locale setting is still in the 
> proposal phase. Do you have any examples? In my experience changing 
> locale dynamically more often than not breaks programs' expectations.

I don't have specific examples to share.  Code that does this pretty 
much has to rely on extensions like POSIX uselocale() and Microsoft's 
_configthreadlocale() since, as you note, taking a lock to ensure global 
locale settings stay consistent effectively single threads requests.  A 
quick code search of github for these functions has lots of hits, but 
many are duplicate hits (if there is a way to get github to better 
suppress similar hits, I'd be curious to know how to do that).

I agree that dynamically changing locale is rarely a good thing to do.  
It can be ok as part of program startup, but afterwards is asking for 
trouble - same as changing other global state like current working 
directory.  I just mentioned it because, despite likely being a bad 
idea, there is existing code that does it.

Tom.

>
> On Tue, Oct 2, 2018 at 10:21 PM Tom Honermann <tom at honermann.net 
> <mailto:tom at honermann.net>> wrote:
>
>     Enclosed is a draft of an SG16 direction paper to be discussed at our
>     meeting tomorrow.  It's rough, but I think in sufficient shape for
>     discussion.
>
>     If we manage to get through that paper, we'll discuss the paper Steve
>     just posted to our mailing list [1] and/or Markus' feedback paper [2].
>
>     Tom.
>
>     [1]:
>     http://www.open-std.org/pipermail/unicode/2018-October/000144.html
>     [2]:
>     https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aI0mBcH-d3BLjs8NRHgGECbA320LGFgo-SrNJ6VnLKE/edit
>
>     _______________________________________________
>     SG16 Unicode mailing list
>     Unicode at isocpp.open-std.org <mailto:Unicode at isocpp.open-std.org>
>     http://www.open-std.org/mailman/listinfo/unicode
>

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