phobo's std.file is completely broke!

[Vladimir Panteleev]

On Wednesday, 19 September 2018 at 05:49:41 UTC, Nick Sabalausky 
(Abscissa) wrote:
> [...]

Someone mentioned in this thread that .NET runtime does do the 
long-path workaround automatically. One thing we could do is copy 
EXACTLY what C# is doing.

The rationale being that:
- .NET is made by Microsoft
- The Windows API's filesystem implementation is made by Microsoft
- Given that these two are made by the same party, it's 
reasonable to assume that the .NET authors authoritatively "knew 
what they were doing" when implementing the workaround.
- The algorithm used by .NET is very likely to be supported by 
the API (even future implementations), as well as third-party 
implementations of the API.

However, there are still drawbacks to this:

- There is still the matter of overhead (one OS API call 
(GetCurrentDirectory) and at least one GC allocation (for the 
current directory buffer)).
- Using paths longer than MAX_PATH is an exceptional situation. 
Putting the workaround in the main code path penalizes 99.9% of 
use cases.
- The registry switch in newer Windows versions removes the need 
for this workaround, so systems with it enabled are penalized as 
well.
- There is still the matter regarding special filenames, as well 
as whether the expected behavior is really to succeed and create 
paths inaccessible to most software, instead of failing.