[Lazarus] Any chance of changing the LCL Unicode encoding to UTF-16?

[Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho]

On Sun, Aug 3, 2008 at 6:43 AM, Marco van de Voort <marcov at stack.nl> wrote:
>> So, any chance of changing the LCL Unicode encoding to UTF-16?
>
> That is not sane. I think if you are going to make assumptions,
> unicodestring being *DEFAULT* utf-8 on Linux and utf-16 on windows (or
> whatever native encoding the respective platform has) is the more likely
> outcome.

Varying encodings are a very unlikely option for the LCL, because a
single encoding is much easier for developers to deal with, and we try
to keep a consistent path.

We could teorically at some point discuss changing from UTF-8 to
UTF-16, but there are no plans to implement this at the moment. The
only advantage of changing is Delphi compatibility, and we started our
unicode support before they announced theirs, so they are the ones
breaking compatibility. The disadvantage of changing is that we will
break compatibility with ourselves, and a lot of developers are
relying in our utf-8 support, so a lot of discussion would be
necessary before this could happen.

Honestly Delphi has hat a very unstable history in the last years. I
think noone is in favor of blindly following them.

Keeping 2 libraries compatible doesn't really look that easy when one
of them can change freely. A more realistic solution could be making
LCL compilable with Delphi, so that one can use it with both
compilers, instead of using LCL with FPC and VCL with Delphi.

-- 
Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho