[Lazarus] Unicode branch

[Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho]

On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 5:14 PM, Hans-Peter Diettrich
<DrDiettrich1 at aol.com> wrote:
>> I just have been told that Embarcadero plans to do away with the stuff fpc
>> is just implementing in the "Unicode branch" and is on the verge to change
>> to a completely new String type that is
>>  - UTF-16-only,
>>  - Zero-Based, and
>>  - immutable.
>> And thus completely incompatible with any "String" Type ever known in
>> Pascal.
> They also make TObject reference counted...

lol! That's ridiculous ... they will just keep changing and changing?
And expect people to rewrite their codebases every 4 years?

And for me a key advantage of Pascal was always that it is (was?) so
backwards compatible...

On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 9:25 PM, Michael Van Canneyt
<michael at freepascal.org> wrote:
> AFAIK This is only for the new nextgen compiler, for the Win32 target,
> nothing changes.

the win32 platform is already de-facto deprecated, so I don't think
this makes it any better.

On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 8:23 PM, Florian Klämpfl <florian at freepascal.org> wrote:
> FPC is a community approach so compatibility is implemented by those
> being interested in it.

Yes, but such backwards incompatible changes such as changing the
string type, changing TObject, they cannot be added as simply another
feature which exists in parallel with the rest ... everyone has to
migrate into the new thing. For very large codebases the change might
not be viable at all.

-- 
Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho