[Lazarus] Lazarus (UTF8) and Windows: SysToUTF8, UTF8ToSys... Is there a better solution?

[Marcos Douglas]

On Wed, Dec 18, 2013 at 6:48 AM, Juha Manninen
<juha.manninen62 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 18, 2013 at 3:52 AM, Marcos Douglas <md at delfire.net> wrote:
>> I would like to understand: Why Java, .Net and others use UTF-16 as
>> default encode and why Lazarus team chose UTF-8?
>
> ... and don't forget Windows API.
> I believe the decision was made by people who didn't know the issue
> well enough, and some decision had to be pushed quickly.
> I am slowly learning the issues around Unicode. UTF-8 seems to be the
> best encoding for most purposes.
> The only benefit of UTF-16 was supposed to be its fixed size character
> length, but finally it did not happen. All characters in the world did
> not fit into 16-bit space.
> It means UTF-16 wastes space without any real benefits. Only UTF-32
> would bring the fixed size character benefit.
> What more, UTF-16 is confusing because it has variations. It all is
> well explained here:
>   http://www.utf8everywhere.org/

I will read, thanks.

> At my work we must switch to Unicode but the details of how to do it
> are still open. The code now works with both Delphi and FPC.
> There is a highly optimized DB engine where most data fits in a cache
> at run-time making it lightning fast. UTF-16 would almost double the
> space requirement and thus is out of question. The core parts must use
> UTF-8 anyway. One choice is to dump Delphi completely and use
> FPC+Lazarus for everything. Lets see...

Here too, more or less... I'm thinking to switch all own packages to UTF-8.
But, in your codes, how do you works on Delphi -- or with Lazarus on
Windows -- using your core parts? There are many calls from/to
SysToUTF8 and/or UTF8ToSys from core to Windows?

Thanks,
Marcos Douglas