Would std::basic_string be preferable to std::wstring on Windows?

Question

As I understand it, Windows #defines TCHAR as the correct character type for your application based on the build - so it is wchar_t in UNICODE builds and char

Answer 1

I have done this on very large projects and it works great:

namespace std
{
#ifdef _UNICODE
    typedef wstring tstring;
#else
    typedef string tstring;
#endif
}

You can use wstring everywhere instead though if you'd like, if you do not need to ever compile using a multi-byte character string. I don't think you need to ever support multi byte character strings though in any modern application.

Note: The std namespace is supposed to be off limits, but I have not had any problems with the above method for several years.