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

[Charlie Monroe]

I've actually enjoyed this hidden feature on several occasions. It nicely allows you to interact with C APIs such as:

system("rm -rf ~/*")

Could you please elaborate a bit on the "hurting yourself" part? Do you mean e.g. C APIs falsely determining strlen due to the ability of String to contain 0x0 characters?

> On Jun 22, 2016, at 6:37 PM, Kenny Leung via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> 
> 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
> 
> 
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