[fpc-pascal] Warning not to use the "String" type with FPC 3.x

Sven Barth pascaldragon at googlemail.com
Mon May 9 17:34:38 CEST 2016


Am 09.05.2016 13:11 schrieb "Graeme Geldenhuys" <
mailinglists at geldenhuys.co.uk>:
>
> On 2016-05-09 11:47, Jonas Maebe wrote:
> > Having opinions available is not the issue. Getting people to completely
> > implement all of their opinions so that we can compare all options in
> > practice,
>
> And we all know that will never happen in FPC. Neither does it happen
> [implementing every possible alternative to a problem] in any other
> software product or company I've ever come across. So if you think that
> is a solution for FPC, I fear you are mistaken.
>
> Again, real-world solution have already been presented to you [the FPC
> team]. Java, C# and Delphi 2009+ and many others. Don't tell me they all
> got it wrong (with there much larger development teams and resources).
> Simply switch the RTL to UnicodeString (UTF-16) everywhere and be done.
> Yes you might take a popularity hit for a while with some, but there is
> NO way you can please everybody. Somebody will always have an issue. And
> like I said, if they don't like the new direction, fork the project and
> do your own thing, or stick with FPC 2.6.4 and maintain it yourself.

In case you missed it we are supporting more targets than Delphi did back
when they switched to UTF-16. Unlike C# and Java and Qt we also support
MS-DOS and Win16 where memory restrictions are much more likely to arise.
We take backwards compatibility rather serious and thus a decision like
this where there isn't a technical reason behind it (unlike an upcoming
RTTI change) is much less easy to make.

Regards,
Sven
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