[fpc-devel] Qt, Java and Unicode support

[Sergei Gorelkin]

Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:
> 
> So would it maybe help if we took a peek at what those frameworks have
> done. Clearly they managed to do it right as no developers or users
> are complaining!  So I guess Free Pascal could learn from them and
> don't have to go through the whole R&D process. Study what those two
> frameworks did and apply the same thing to Free Pascal!
> 
Unfortunately what those frameworks did isn't directly applicable to FPC.
First, as I understand, they have only one (UTF-16) string type. This is 
good because it avoids whatever mess related to conversions, but not an 
option for FPC (because FPC requires compatibility with existing code).

Second, their string type is an object, therefore it is toolkit-specific 
rather than language-specific. It has very little, if any, to do with 
the compiler.

Third, QT is a shared library (and Java framework may also be treated as 
such), and it implements huge Unicode conversion tables without putting 
them into every executable.

Regards,
Sergei