The rationale talks about easy portability to Windows, but I'm skeptical - the u...

Someone1234 · on March 22, 2016

Windows supports forward-slash fine. Has for at least 25 years. No need to change / to \ or visa versa.

Now obviously any Windows port would have to call Win32 APIs instead of POSIX APIs (unless you're writing for a Cygwin-like layer).

2Xheadpalm · on March 22, 2016

Supported, just but it's a second class citizen, for example, no tab completion of directories on the cmd prompt when using forward slash. Some commands will not except it;

e.g. type c:\home\foo.txt -> cats it out type c:/home/foo.txt -> 'The syntax of this command is incorrect.'

whereas cd will except either forward or backslash

cd c:\home/foo cd c:/home/foo

work as expected.

Someone1234 · on March 22, 2016

Firstly I was talking about API support. Since that is the topic at hand.

Secondly, Cmd is deprecated. Powershell supports both slashes and "type c:/home/foo.txt" works perfectly.

ktRolster · on March 22, 2016

But Powershell redirects < and > either don't work or can corrupt your files

Someone1234 · on March 22, 2016

You might find this useful:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh847746.aspx

ktRolster · on March 23, 2016

A) That's only one direction, the other way doesn't work

B) Even going that direction, at times it corrupts the data

pjmlp · on March 22, 2016

Just use Powershell, it will work as expected.

tacos · on March 22, 2016

You might want to review the Xamarin bug reports as the slash alone nearly put them out of business at least three times.

BuckRogers · on March 22, 2016

I write a lot of single source Windows/OSX/Linux utilities and the nice thing about Windows is that back and forward slashes are interchangeable so you can just write for POSIX.

keeperofdakeys · on March 22, 2016

Most languages (including Rust), already support path libraries that abstract this away from you. As long as you use these libraries properly, you should never have these issues.