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

[Jürgen Hestermann]

Am 24.12.2013 15:26, schrieb Marco van de Voort:
 >> But in APIs it would not matter much to convert (in general the time for
 >> conversion is negligible compared to the time that is needed for the 
rest
 >> around the API call).
 > Maybe. (less so for fine grained structures, e.g. think a virtual 
stringgrid
 > with many nodes).

Well, I use VirtualStringGrid with millions of nodes in my program
and it works like a charm (with UTF8) on Windows.


 >> I have written a file manager for Windows that can log and store 
millions
 >> of files in memory.  It uses the (UTF16) unicode API from Windows and
 >> converts the file names as UTF8 internally.  There exists another file
 >> manager who uses UTF16 internally too which can also log millions of
 >> files.
 > That's because the cost is hidden by slow harddisk movement.

When I log my whole hard disk multiple times the the logging comes 
totally from memory.
There is no hard disk movement at all.
Still there is no difference.


 >> IMO this decision is based on the assumption to choose one encoding 
for everything.
 > Well, that is a wrong (and arbitrary) assumption then. If you want to 
play
 > make believe and reorganize the world top-down be my guess, but leave
 > practical design matters in the current world out of it. We simply 
have to
 > live in the world we live in, not the world that could have been

It is the world of exact such thinking.
People are creating this.
It's not a law of nature.


 > Document encodings are for end users, programming
 > interfaces are for programmers. Lazarus users are programmers, except for
 > sourceencoding which IMHO can remain utf8 just happily (just like Delphi
 > btw)

That's nonsense.
The *need* to convert between encodings should be restricted to just 
that: Only when it is needed.
We should never force people (neither programmers nor users nor anyone) 
to juggle encodings.
The aim should be to *reduce* conversions not to increase them.