Adopt modern C++ and get rid of C style coding

[pjmlp]

In the ongoing discussion of safety in C++ code bases, it is a bit strange that at the light of Microsoft initiatives like Secure Future Initiative and Azure's security initiatives, as mentioned on Microsoft Azure security evolution: Embrace secure multitenancy, Confidential Compute, and Rust, that Azure C++ SDK still exposes several C like code patterns like C style strings and arrays, instead of safer C++ standard types.

[LarryOsterman]

Thank you for the suggestions.

We have two cases where we will use C style APIs and arrays. The first case occurs when we interact with libCURL, AMQP, WinHTTP and other C libraries - since we are interacting with C libraries, we have no choice but to use C style constructs.

The other case which is intentionally made involves static constant C style strings are typically safe, and more importantly, if they were converted to C++ style strings, it would require runtime initialization of the strings at process startup. It is not clear that there is any additional safety associated with converting strings from static C style strings to c++ strings (and because we have standardized on C++ 14 we cannot use constexpr std::string variables).

If there are other examples of us using C style strings in our public API surface, or in our C++ only code, we absolutely should fix them.

It would be appreciated if you could help us out by pointing cases where we are using C style strings in our codebase.

[github-actions]

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[pjmlp]

Hi, these was the kind of code that caught my attention,

azure-sdk-for-cpp/sdk/core/azure-core/src/base64.cpp

Line 347 in 27c2e5d

int32_t Base64Decode(const char* encodedBytes)

azure-sdk-for-cpp/sdk/core/azure-core/src/environment.cpp

Line 25 in 27c2e5d

std::string Environment::GetVariable(const char* name)

azure-sdk-for-cpp/sdk/storage/azure-storage-common/inc/azure/storage/common/internal/xml_wrapper.hpp

Line 41 in 27c2e5d

explicit XmlReader(const char* data, size_t length);

azure-sdk-for-cpp/sdk/storage/azure-storage-queues/src/rest_client.cpp

Line 559 in 27c2e5d

_internal::XmlReader reader(