Microsoft open sources C++ REST SDK "Casablanca" (opens in new tab)

I don't know what you're talking about, Win32 supports UTF-8. I can pass CP_UTF8 into WideCharToMultiByte() just fine. :-)

Kidding aside, I don't really see the issue. Do you get upset about in-memory representation of strings often? How about when using Java or Python? Is this not why there is an entire programming practice called "serialization"? Windows started supporting UCS-2 before UTF-8 existed, and so the internal representation on Windows remains 16 bits per char.

But this isn't using the Win32 API. At least not directly, and certainly not on Linux.

Unrelated: Where is this "unsignedchar" keyword coming from?

Windows chooses to use UTF-16 rather than UTF-8, but is it really that much of a concern?

You can't abandon them if you want to have fast code.

It is possible to write code in a portable fashion, accepting utf-8 as a standard string encoding, but this will then require converting to/from utf-16 for virtually every Windows API call that takes in a string variable. Not hard to do (MultiByteToWideChar), but there's a non-negligible performance penalty.

The .then() method appears to be something on concurrency::task, which is part of the Microsoft's Parallel Pattern Library. This article says:

"we've started a new project called Casablanca to build a modern C++ library for cloud-based client-server communication, in which all concurrent operations are exposed as PPL tasks."

http://www.drdobbs.com/parallel/improving-futures-and-callba...

Link to Microsoft's C++ committee proposal (N3327): http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2012/n332...

I've used that style of programming in some of my hobby projects (mixed with other obvious sequencing operations like wait_until(predicate) and delay(time)) for doing timeline scripting. In my experience, it tended to become a mess when I needed things more complex than linear action sequences (e.g. conditionals, loops, etc. are better suited to a real interpreter).

As far as common uses of chaining for sequencing in C++, the only common use that comes to mind is iostreams operator <<, but that predates lambdas.

That looks like Microsoft's new "async everywhere" approach to API design. It's probably a pretty good idea in concept, but I hope they don't expect C++ developers to actually write those awful nested lambda .then() blocks for what are conceptually sequential actions.

Microsoft has already given the world the "Microsoft Public License" and "Microsoft Reciprocal License".

Sure, and I knew all that (or at least remembered hearing about it). But there's a big difference between the abstract knowledge that MS isn't completely hostile to open source and actually finding yourself browsing source code on their site. I'm a crufty old cynic, but I was still shocked.

Looking at the source, it looks like this lib uses boost:asio on non windows platforms.