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

[Juha Manninen]

On Sat, Dec 21, 2013 at 3:08 AM, Marcos Douglas <md at delfire.net> wrote:
> I didn't understand. If I have a TStringList instance, on Windows, I
> need to convert Text property to ANSI. But some components, e.g.
> TMemo, do these conversions automatically, but this is different.

TMemo is a GUI component. Then the string encoding matters and it must
be converted to the native widgetset encoding. Still, the conversion
is automatic. You don't need to care about it if you work with LCL
components only and not with WinAPI directly.

TStringList is not a GUI component. It can be used for example in an
embedded Linux program with no GUI.
It does not need to know the encoding (except for sorting maybe). With
FPC no automatic conversions happen.

In Delphi things are different. The auto-conversion happens ALWAYS
when assigning between eg. UTF-8 and UTF-16. It has nothing to do with
WinAPI, or any other widgetset API.
Native string is UTF-16. If you have
  var MyUTF8Str: UTF8String;
  ...
  StringList.Add(MyUTF8Str);   <- triggers conversion
  MyUTF8Str := StringList[0];   <- triggers conversion again

The amazing thing is that such code works. Delphi does a good job in
converting the strings.
It is also reasonably fast, but still not acceptable in a speed
critical code. This was the problem in my employer's code base. We are
thinking how to use UTF-8 for the core program without triggering many
auto-conversions. One choice is to dump Delphi and use only FPC. Now
the code still works with both.

Juha

P.S.
  I am still wondering why you are so fond of WinAPI while you have a
nice cross-platform API available.