[Lazarus] Beyond Compare 4 built with Lazarus 1.2

[Marco van de Voort]

On Sat, Jan 04, 2014 at 10:08:07AM +0000, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:
> 
> We will have to wait for FPC 2.8.0 (or 3.0) which should have much
> better built-in Unicode support. String encoding conversion should then
> be taken care of automatically. Unfortunately it seems that the FPC RTL
> (there will be two of them) will be AnsiString or UTF-16 only. The RTL
> encoding is not configurable!
> 
> So under all Unix-like systems (Linux, MacOSX, FreeBSD - basically every
> platform except Microsoft ones) there will be lots of string conversions
> from/to the OS or any libraries (which are normally UTF-8) to the FPC
> RTL which is going to be UTF-16. 

So that's why you use the ansistring RTL there, unless you value Delphi
compatibility. On those targets (except a few embedded Linux and OpenBSD
ones), the default encoding is utf8 and any ansistring is utf8, case closed.

> The constant conversion will also kick
> in when you do streaming to/from file or any TCP/IP communications -
> which both normally use UTF-8.

Please stop with your baseless fearmongering.

That's irrelevant, for sources that don't have a compiletime known codepage
(if only CP_ACP aka "default").  Those are bytebuffers with an encoding
described by headers, and thus fall outside the scope of automated
conversions.

> I would have thought the Free Pascal team would improve their design
> over Delphi.

We have consistently chose Delphi compatibility for years, so why you are
thinking this is fairly strange.