[Lazarus] non Unicodode application

[Mattias Gaertner]

On Fri, 12 Feb 2016 14:25:43 +0100
Michael Schnell <mschnell at lumino.de> wrote:

>[...]
> 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.
> 
> 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  ?

FPC 3.0+ does not arbitrarily change the encoding of strings.
That's why the LCL can use UTF-8 in AnsiStrings even without the new
UTF-8 mode. It works pretty similar to FPC 2.6.4.

The many encoding discussions raised from the problem that the LCL
uses UTF-8 strings in RTL classes which expect system encoding.
Your friend does not have this problem.

Your friend can use the LCL for the GUI with disabled UTF-8 mode.
He has to check (convert) the strings between his TCP/IP code and the
LCL controls (e.g. UTF8ToSys). As he has only a small GUI this should
be easy.


> As I lost the clue on the planned path regarding code-aware strings: 
> will this be possible with future versions of Lazarus ,as well ?

The new UTF-8 mode is easier for new projects. Many old projects still
use the old mode. So chances are high that it will be supported the
next years.

Mattias