[fpc-devel] Is calling the Windows Unicode APIs really faster than the ANSI API's?y

[Marco van de Voort]

In our previous episode, Martin Schreiber said:
> >
> Hmm, you should ask the Russian users for example if they prefer MSEgui utf-16 
> internal encoding or Lazarus utf-8.

Users always look short term, and want to change as little as possible. 

This goes both for UTF-16 (with the "is UCS2" approximation and keep the old
ways of string indexing) as for UTF-8 (as superset of ansi, avoidance of
multiple file types (no endianess)).

Note that e.g. source ocde seems to go en masse in the direction of UTF-8
(Even Tiburon, which works exclusively on Windows, an UTF-16 platform, saves
source default to UTF8 afaik).

Anyway, I think a mix of UTF-8 and UTF-16 is here to stay, so better deal
with it. UTF-8 won't go away as legacy anytime soon.

It's the developers responsibility to keep an eye out for the long term
direction of a toolchain.