Which library do you pick? Which ones are good? Bad?
What are the common pitfalls that the library must deal with?
How do you know how to evaluate them if all you know is "not UTF-8? Abort with error" ?
What are the common pitfalls that the library must deal with?
How do you know how to evaluate them if all you know is "not UTF-8? Abort with error" ?
Do you have any experience at all with different charsets under the hood by the way?
There are examples of where people used encryption libraries in the wrong way and undermined the strength of the encryption (for example, CVE-2024-31497 in PuTTY).
A very big part of software development is dealing with leaky abstractions. We don't work with perfect black boxes. We need to understand enough of how things works in the lower layers to avoid problems. Note here that I wrote "enough", not "everything", or "write everything yourself".
I would not want a person writing software to handle charset conversion if he refuses to learn how the various encodings work, which charset will decode as another charset or not, etc.
"older approach, PuTTY developers said, was devised at a time when Microsoft Windows lacked native support for a cryptographic random number generator."
So "enough of how things work" could just be "pick a modern encryption library" that doesn't come from the dark ages when t there were no random numbers
Same with encodings, it requires a much lower level understanding to pick a library, you can rely on the expertise of others