Strings and C side primitives

[Lendvai Attila]

Hi,
 
Recently we had  some discussion about vm.h not being includable, and then we ended up that basically it shouldn't be included at all because C side primitives shouldn't really use anything from the vm.
 
It brings up a question how should C prims be written platform independently that use strings. File prims are an example, that return unicode file names on windoze.
 
We could fix the interface to communicate trough an utf16[], but on some platforms it would only be a hassle, etc...
 
But we could also extend vm generation so that it contains all the platform specific code in pidgin reduced to one-liner "directly" entries. What do you think about this?
 
And if it's not the way to go, then what should be the interface between VM and C prims with strings?
 
One more tought: I understand that this C vm was only done to make a step towards an optimizing compiler, but even if there is one the vm could be useful in certain situations. So what is the official optinion about the future of the vm? I'm asking to decide how much effort should be put into designing/implementing things like unicode-aware file system primitives, etc...
 
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