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

[Mattias Gaertner]

On Mon, 16 Dec 2013 23:41:34 -0200
Marcos Douglas <md at delfire.net> wrote:

>[...]
> I think use one encoding on all platforms is good, however Windows
> uses UTF-16. All string from/to Windows needs to be converted, right?
> Is this not a penalty for Windows platform?

The Windows API is UTF-16, most text files and databases are not. You
will always have some conversions. In most cases the conversion is
hardly measurable, but there are cases where UTF-16 is better and cases
where UTF-8 is better. And in some cases even UTF-32 is better.
The LCL is graphical library, so string speed hardly matters.


> What coding FPC's team chose to use on Windows in the next release of
> the compiler, UTF-16?

I'm not member of the FPC team, but afaik UTF-16 would be a big
incompatibility, so the next release will still using system codepage
string for Windows. Maybe eventually another flavor with UTF-16.

 
>[...]
> Lazarus uses only 'string', not UTF8String, UnicodeString,
> RawByteString, etc. This will change?

Lazarus used only string (AnsiString), now it has to be more specific
at some places to avoid unnecessary conversions by the compiler.

Mattias