[fpc-devel] Qt, Java and Unicode support

[Marco van de Voort]

In our previous episode, Sergei Gorelkin said:
> > 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).

FPC also doesn't have the "isolation from the system" philosophy in the
magnitude that Java has.

I can only guess about QT's reasons. In Kylix times I  once heard a rumour
that QT was mostly modeled after NT's api philosophy, to make it programmers
easier to migrate. (it was said that was also why CG chose it instead of
GTK, though I can imagine GTK bugs also could have been a (more) major
reason)