[Lazarus] Unicode branch

[Marco van de Voort]

On Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 05:59:06PM +0200, Hans-Peter Diettrich wrote:
> > Yeah, that change is going to be a nightmare to lots of existing code. I
> > hope Delphi developers enjoy debugging!
> 
> I don't see any relationship to COM here. Java has managed objects, C++ 
> has, .NET has, so why not OPL too?

Java and C# don't count, as safe languages, they have _ONLY_ managed types.
Their choices will be hard to backport.

As far as the C++ bit goes, that is all fairly new. Which part of the
standard (and which standard) do you mean exactly, and which implementation?
 
> The management overhead is as low as for managed strings.

Where did you get that information? It is easy to see that it is somewhat
doubtful as string has copy-on-write properties in addition to ref-counting.

> I don't like managed (refcounted) class objects for other reasons. In 
> detail they can easily lead to zombies, which keep each other alive by 
> circular references. It also is not really possible to remove 
> destructor/finalizer code in such an environment, so that no or 
> dangerous comfort is the only result from using such a model.

I think Embarcadero is using the mobile version as testing ground, and
maybe they are having doubts if the desktop-mobile product lines will be
synchronous in the long end.