Hi Everyone,
I've been talking to Howard about this and he suggested to post it to this mailing list. There are two things that I recently noticed about how LMDB works with various encodings and I think it's worth to discuss.
1. Database names
mdb_dbi_open treats its name parameter as a C string. This means UTF-8 on unixes and ANSI on Windows, which is problematic for cross-platform applications.
My suggestion is to create a variant of this function that also accepts a length parameter (or just use MDB_val) so that instead of treating it as a C string, it would treat it like a series of bytes, allowing the user to use the encoding of their choice.
2. Path names
Functions like mdb_env_open, mdb_env_get_path, mdb_env_copy and the likes accept a char* for path names. This is fine on most unixes where char* is an UTF-8 string, but unfortunately, these functions call the ANSI variants of the Windows API functions, making it impossible to use Unicode path names with them.
I think we should switch to the widechar APIs instead, but that would also mean changing the LMDB API to accept a wchar_t* parameter on Windows instead of char*.
What do you guys think about all this?
Best regards, Timur Kristóf