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

[Jürgen Hestermann]

Am 2013-12-17 02:41, schrieb Marcos Douglas:
 > 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?

I am just writing a file manager for Windows (hopefully can port it to Linux later)
and I don't see any performance problems by using UTF8 in my program while the API is UTF16.
Most (if not all) things that I do with files take much longer than the string conversion so it does not matter much.

IMO it makes very much sense to use UTF8 (which Linux uses anyway) throughout all programs.
Having multiple string encodings within Lazarus/FPC makes it worse than necessary.

Maybe some day all programs and OS's use UTF8 so that
we never need to think about encodings anymore (just dreaming...).
At least, the more UTF8 is used the fewer conversions are needed.

I think that UTF8 is the English language of encoding ;-)