zehmatt / cpp-better-main

Better C++ main

cpp-better-main

Better C++ main

#include <bmain/bmain.hpp>
#include <iostream>

// This is the entry point of your application. Arguments are passed in as a vector/span of strings with UTF-8
// encoding.
int bmain(bmain_args args)
{
    for (const auto& arg : args)
    {
        std::cout << arg << std::endl;
    }
    return 0;
}

Why

On Windows the main() function uses ANSI for the arguments, using wmain() is not great as having to deal with wchar_t type is not well supported on other platforms and when creating cross platform applications having to deal with this is pretty annoying, other platforms typically have UTF-8 encoded strings for the arguments, to reduce the boilerplate code I opted to create this to just have one entry point that has always UTF-8 strings, also instead of the traditional C style argc, argv it uses vector or span depending on the cpp language version being used.

Usage

The easiest way to use this is using CMake, simply add better-main to your targets linked libraries, if you are not using CMake you can just copy the source files into the project where you wish to use it. After that modify your main(int argc, const char* argv[]) to int bmain(bmain_args args), that's it. Be aware that this should not be used for static or shared libraries and will likely break your build.

On Windows the arguments will be converted to hold UTF-8 encoded strings, other platforms usually already pass the arguments UTF-8 encoded.

Overhead

I acknowledge that there is a slight performance overhead due to the use of std::vector and std::string. However, on the Windows platform, it is necessary to convert the arguments to UTF-8 encoding, which requires some additional memory for storing the converted strings. In my view, this is the most compatible choice, and the minor overhead is typically negligible in most scenarios. Furthermore, I opted for this approach to maintain uniformity. This approach should work with even with older language versions like C++98.