Vix Path

The path module provides fast, explicit, and cross-platform utilities to manipulate filesystem paths lexically in C++.

It is designed as a low-level building block for:

• filesystem operations (vix::fs)
• CLI tools
• configuration systems
• build tools
• backend services

The module favors predictability, portability, and explicit behavior.

Philosophy

Path handling in Vix follows strict rules:

• No filesystem access
• Purely lexical operations
• Cross-platform behavior (POSIX + Windows)
• No implicit normalization
• Explicit error handling (Result<T>)

This ensures that every operation is:

• deterministic
• safe
• easy to reason about

Core Concepts

Concept	Purpose
join	Combine path fragments
normalize	Normalize path lexically
filename	Extract last component
parent / dirname	Extract parent directory
stem	Filename without extension
extension	File extension
relative	Compute relative path
absolute	Resolve against base
split	Decompose path
PathOptions	Control behavior
Result<T>	Explicit success / failure

Path Model

Paths are treated as strings with structure, not as filesystem objects.

Supported forms:

POSIX

/usr/bin
/home/user/file.txt

Windows

C:\Windows\System32
C:relative\path
\\server\share

Mixed separators are accepted:

foo\bar/baz

Joining Paths

#include <vix/path/Join.hpp>

auto r = vix::path::join("/home/user", "projects/vix");

Result:

/home/user/projects/vix

Normalizing Paths

#include <vix/path/Normalize.hpp>

auto r = vix::path::normalize("/a//b/./c/../d");

Result:

/a/b/d

Inspecting Paths

#include <vix/path/Filename.hpp>
#include <vix/path/Stem.hpp>
#include <vix/path/Extension.hpp>

auto f = filename("/home/user/main.cpp");
auto s = stem("/home/user/main.cpp");
auto e = extension("/home/user/main.cpp");

Relative Paths

#include <vix/path/Relative.hpp>

auto r = relative("/home/user/projects/vix", "/home/user");

Result:

projects/vix

Absolute Paths

#include <vix/path/Absolute.hpp>

auto r = absolute("docs/readme.md", "/home/user");

Split Path

#include <vix/path/Split.hpp>

auto r = split("/home/user/main.cpp");

Error Model

All operations return:

Result<std::string>

Tests

Run:

vix build
vix tests

License

MIT Part of the Vix.cpp project.