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

[Ivan Gan]

UTF-8 is the better encoding system to use
It is more compact than UTF-16 & why make applications more bloated than 
they already are?
I agree with Felipe, a single encoding is better
UTF-8 is also very widely supported on the net with an increasing number 
of web pages using it
Existing ANSI encoded applications can be upgraded easily using UTF-8, 
UTF-16 requires a lot more work
Delphi VCL is Windows, not cross platform, Lazarus LCL is a better 
solution anyhow
Delphi was a great tool & the creators done a fantastic job but it no 
longer leads the way as it used to
Lazarus is now in my view a better environment to work with & is 
beginning to take the lead anyhow
Is Delphi simply following Lazarus by introducing Unicode?
Using UTF-8 on linux & UTF-16 on windows is a mistake, it would force 
code changes & loose cross platform abilities which are the real 
strength of Lazarus
What I need to see when developing is consistency across platforms, 
anything else costs money & time
I would far rather see time being spent on addressing the weak areas 
like better Internet support, the INDY component set don't work properly 
& I haven't found any other set as easy to use
We have effective Unicode support in Lazarus, ok, next problem please, 
thats my view

Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho wrote:
> 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.
>
>   
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