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

[Jürgen Hestermann]

Am 2013-12-25 19:50, schrieb Marco van de Voort:
 > In short, I don't think fighting the native encoding of an target is worth
 > the shallow appeal of the "one encoding rules all" principle. That is mostly
 > pushed by people that don't even use windows, and thus won't feel the pain.

This is not true!
I am programming for Windows exlusively (currently) and still want UTF8 everywhere.
UTF8 is the most useful encoding *and* Lazarus uses it *and* it is used in many other situations.
And I don't want to think about encodings all the time.
I want a single string type in my programs.


Therefore I now need to write my own Windows interface unit because FPC does not
provide Unicode file API functions.
If the Windows unit of FPC migrates to unicode soon I still cannot use it because
it would use the foolish UTF16 string type which I still need to convert to UTF8.
What an incredible short-sighted decision.
The unique opportunity to establish a single Unicode string type encoding (UTF8)
within the whole programming environment Free Pascal/Lazarus has been missed.