Just Let It Flow

As everybody who’s ever done some Windows programming knows, string handling functions come in two flavours. A versions for char based strings, and W versions for WCHAR based strings with the actual function names being macros that expand to the correct versions depending on whether UNICODE has been defined. This is fine and all, but since macros are generally frowned upon in C++ surely there’s a better way to go about this? Surely there’s a method that’ll choose the correct version of the function to use based on whatever type of string the function is given.

Every so often the topic of having multiple consoles for a single application comes up on various fora and the reaction is, in general, that you can’t. While this is correct from a technical/windows architecture standpoint, the illusion of multiple consoles can be realised in differing ways varying by degrees of work required.