Some questions about wil::reg

[Peter Wu]

Hello,
I have taken a look at wil::reg and have a few questions that I was hoping you could clarify:

1. Is there a specific reason for using PCWSTR for subkey and value_name instead of std::wstring?
2. In reference to the Remarks provided for RegOpenKeyExW, would it be more appropriate to use RegOpenCurrentUser for HKEY_CURRENT_USER?

Thank you for your assistance and insights. Looking forward to your response.

Best regards.

[Duncan Horn]

Regarding your first question:

• Not all consumers of WIL have access to the STL, so any code that uses STL types must be guarded, limiting their usefulness. This has a cascading effect where any functions using those functions must also be guarded
• For input, none of the Windows APIs accept std::basic_string, so using that for input params would needlessly require consumers to construct one, wasting time and memory
• For output, std::basic_string is a terrible API to use for output buffers due to the lack of some form of uninitialized_resize that would allow us to change the underlying buffer size without needlessly writing zeros to the soon-to-be overwritten or discarded memory

[Fulgen301]

due to the lack of some form of uninitialized_resize

For the sake of completion: C++23 has introduced resize_and_overwrite, although this doesn't help with older C++ standards of course.

[Duncan Horn]

Huh, good to know, I missed that. But yeah, the C++ version requirement (the Windows codebase is still on C++17 as the default AFAIK) and all other issues still apply.