CppCon 2014: James McNellis "Unicode in C++"

James McNellis explains the fundamentals of Unicode and the state of text encoding support in C++.

cppcon.org — Presentation Slides, PDFs, Source Code and other presenter materials are available at: github.com/CppCon/CppCon2014 -- In some programming languages, text processing is easy. Unfortunately, C++ is not one of those languages. C++ lacks good, built-in support for Unicode, though the situation is starting to improve. This session will begin with a brief overview of text encodings, and an introduction to Unicode and the various Unicode encodings. We'll look at the woeful state of Unicode support in C++98 (or, really, lack thereof), then take a look at the improvements that were made in C++11 and other improvements that have recently been proposed for standardization. We'll finish up with a discussion of several libraries designed to make it easier to work with Unicode in C++, including the widely-used, open-source International Components for Unicode (ICU) library. -- James McNellis is a senior engineer on the Microsoft Visual C++ team, where he is responsible for the Visual C++ C Runtime (CRT) and C Standard Library implementation. He was previously a member of the Microsoft Expression Blend team, developing the XAML designer tools for Windows 8 apps. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2010, he spent several years working on real-time 3-D simulation and robotics projects in the defense industry. James is a prolific contributor on the Stack Overflow programming Q&A website and occasionally writes for the Visual C++ Team Blog. He tweets at @JamesMcNellis and can be found elsewhere online via jamesmcnellis.com. -- Videos Filmed & Edited by Bash Films: BashFilms.com Work at Hudson River Trading (HRT): tinyurl.com/safxfctf