[Lazarus] Does Lazarus support a complete Unicode Component Library?

[Hans-Peter Diettrich]

Graeme Geldenhuys schrieb:
> Op 2011-02-17 13:58, Hans-Peter Diettrich het geskryf:
>> IMO the new Unicode versions broke so much legacy code, that FPC/Lazarus
>> could become a real successor of the last Ansi version,
> 
> I don't think so. Yes the Unicode support in Delphi broke a lot of code,
> but I think that was just a small bump in the road. I believe
> Embarcadero expected that too. But then a few months after the release,
> all the flamewars died down. Now it's business as usual again.

Well, the move was quite painless for most users, because the new string 
model and also the code conversion tool was well designed. Nonetheless 
it could have been a bit safer, WRT e.g. PCHAR and byte counts in I/O.

Also implied conversions may not be noticeable to many users, and this 
also may apply to a future FPC/Lazarus model.

The lack of complaints after the move is typical for Unicode moves on 
Windows, same observation many years ago with VB5. Most coders only use 
the BMP, so that UTF-16 is not a serious problem, and the non-BMP users 
don't have to face anything new at all. I suspect that nobody seriously 
tries to deal with strings of foreign codepages, apart from storage and 
display, even in an Unicode enabled application. This might also be an 
argument for the new Unicode string type/encoding for Lazarus - the 
major difference is the different system encoding on Max/Linux, that 
affects more Lazarus than Delphi users.


>> commercial/long term projects anyhow. The debugging of cross-platform
>> applications requires a separate target machine anyhow, so that
> 
> I have zero experience with remote debugging, but from what I have
> heard, it never works as well as native/local debugging. So I guess we
> will just have to wait and see.

In former times remote debugging has been dead slow, sometimes. Most 
probably not a serious problem with nowadays hardware, and certainly not 
with virtual machines (with no physical transmission lines in between).


BTW I was just about to buy a Delphi XE licencse, just for curiosity, 
but then I noticed that it neither supports multiple platforms nor 64 
bit right now :-(

DoDi