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

[Jürgen Hestermann]

Am 2013-12-27 12:21, schrieb Marco van de Voort:
 > The current situation really worries me, since at work I invested in
 > FPC/Lazarus in the assumption that compatibility would increase, not decrease.

I think that's the root cause of the discussion:

Some want to make FPC/Lazarus into a (possibly exact) clone of
Delphi (which means to follow every sh*t that is and will be put into this product)
and others (like me) hope for a more Pascal like programming environment
which at least avoids future (maybe even removes existing) obscurity
crept into Pascal with Borland/Embarcadero.

The ease of use was the reason for success of Turbo-Pascal but
meanwhile this goal has been put aside and it becomes a more
C-like environment (with lots of ugly hacks..).

On the other hand I understand the demand for compatibility if there is a lot of
(Delphi) code that needs to be reused and cannot be changed easily.