[swift-evolution] [Pitch] Remove transparent bridging between Swift strings and char *

[Kenny Leung]

Hi All.

In the spirit of Chris’ focus on Swift 3 message…

I’ve been working on calling C code that takes “const char * const *” arguments, and it ain’t easy, but that can be left for a future proposal…

What does surprise me is that Swift String bridges directly into “char *” arguments in C as nul-terminated C strings, apparently preserving unicode and all. I can find nothing on bridging to “char *” in “Using Swift with Cocoa and Objective-C"

In the spirit of preventing you from hurting yourself, I think this functionality should be removed, forcing you to use cString(using:) first.

-Kenny