* In a previous update in 2021 many copyright ranges were truncated
accidentally, and some files have been copy-pasted with wrong years. These
dates have been fixed based on git history and original copyright messages.
* This prevents unnecessary conversions back and forth between rdcstr and const
char * when going through interfaces. In the OS specific layer this is rarely
an issue because most of the implementations don't convert to rdcstr, but it
is convenient to be able to pass in an rdcstr directly. The few cases where
there's an unecessary construction of an rdcstr is acceptable.
* A couple of places in the public API need to return a string from a global
function, so can't return an rdcstr due to C ABI, so they still return a const
char *.
* Similarly const char * is kept for logging, to avoid a dependency on rdcstr
and because that's one place where unnecessary conversions/constructions may
be impactful.
* This means it outputs natively/properly to stdout/stderr and its output can be
redirected with pipes.
* It does mean we need to be very careful whenever it's run internally to not
pop up a command window, which happens by default.
baldurk