[fpc-devel] RTL Unicode support, Win32/CE

[Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho]

Converting the usual string to utf8 is problematic because it breaks
compatibility with existing non-visual Pascal software. Because of
this I initially proposed to create a new set of routines using
widestring, which would be a utf-16 routines set. To use it with the
LCL we can call conversion routines.

Most core developers insist that this would be too ineficient, but
this is almost never an issue to convert the filenames and similars
which are not the most time consuming task, unless your application
only deals with filenames but do nothing with them. And specially in
GUI software this conversion is no big deal.

I beliave there are no unicode alternative units in the RTL at the moment.

A big problem of the variable encoding as I already mentioned in the
past is that it is more complex to implement and it´s not certain
which problems and inconveniences it may pose to developers.

-- 
Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho