[Lazarus] non Unicodode application

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Fri, 12 Feb 2016, Michael Schnell wrote:

> Hi Experts,
>
> A friend of mine wants to port an application from Delphi 7 to a be a Lazarus 
> 64 Bit Windows application.
>
> This (huge) application only features a very limited GIU, but uses strings 
> lot for "uncoded" characters, going in and out via TCP/IP. Any automatic type 
> conversion would kill the application.

If you code well, none will happen.

>
> So it would be necessary that fpc is configured to use the (old) 8 bit 
> Strings. These might be used with UTF8 encoding for the GUI stuff (and for 
> some limited locations in the business-code with *explicit* conversion).
>
> Is this possible with the current version of Lazarus  ?
>
> As I lost the clue on the planned path regarding code-aware strings: will 
> this be possible with future versions of Lazarus ,as well ?

It is possible today. You don't need an 'old' style fpc.

Just use RawByteString as stringtype for all parameters and variables
in calls where  you don't want code page conversions to occur. The compiler
will not touch the codepage then.

Michael.