[fpc-devel] bug report 20473: Please add a directive to define string=utf8string

[Marco van de Voort]

In our previous episode, Sven Barth said:
> > The difference is more that I don't think it will solve as much as people
> > think, and using this to stitch together code from different origins will
> > fail miserably or be unworkable.
> 
> For non-inheritance-related code that is encoding-agnostic this should 
> be not that much of a big problem, because the compiler will add 
> conversions then. 

That's fine as a temporary solution. 

But keep in mind that such conversions are different from calling e.g.  a
RTL function (except string functions) that also forces a conversion.  This
because whatever the RTL does will most likely be relatively slow, while
redundant conversions between businesscode->(some fcl class) -> (base
classes) can hurt horribly.

They are fine for the transition period, but long term you want to get rid
of unnecessary conversions.

> The problametic parts - as you yourself metioned - 
> will be inheritance (when you need to "guess" the correct string for 
> your override to work) and - I assume - loading and saving of resources 
> (DFM/LFM).

And var parameters, procedure/function types with string parameters used across
units etc. And that is just from memory, when testing probably more will be
found.