[fpc-devel] Unicode and UTF8String

[Marco van de Voort]

In our previous episode, Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho said:
> > RTLString, IOW encoding platform dependant. Except maybe selected widgets like
> > synedit. (Borland stores source in utf-8 too on windows)
> 
> A string whose encoding is unknown is very inconvenient for
> developers. 

I don't see that so strongly as most. 

> The idea just saves itself in the RTL because of the
> eventual need to do some extremely high performance applications. For
> Lazarus it would be simply a useless inconvenience.

Same as above. That is an opinion, not fact, and I don't agree.

It is btw not just about performance, but also about predictability. Less
encodings in use, means better preditability. 

If RTL+LCL are in the system encoding (with LCL mostly hiding odd ball libs
as QT if that is the widgetset), you have a fair chance not to have a
multiencoding app, without thick layers of emu. Or at least keep the
encoding dependant part localised to a fairly small part of the program.

To be honest, I think a case for LCL follows widget set encoding could also
be made.