[fpc-devel] Unicode support (again)

[Mattias Gaertner]

On Tue, 11 Nov 2008 15:43:24 +0100
Michael Schnell <mschnell at lumino.de> wrote:

> 
> > We were talking of a world where strings consist of widechars, not 
> > about the current Lazarus, weren't we?
> I'm not sure. Of course WideStrings and WideChars are easier to be
> used, as in Europe and America problems with surrogate pairs will
> seldom arise, but IMHO the user should be enabled to define what kind
> of string encoding he uses (UTF-8, UTF-16 or UCS2, trading speed
> against memory). The compiler should do the dirty work of converting
> automatically.
> 
> With that the current Lazarus LCL would be perfectly usable (even if
> the user decides to use UCS2 WideStrings and thus can use WideChars).
> 
> OTOH, regarding an improved Lazarus, IMHO he should be enabled to
> choose or compile an LCL version with a UTF16 or UCS2 WideStrings
> API, for improved speed with GUI handling.

AFAIK no one measured a noticeable speed difference between UTF8/16 when
handling GUI.


Mattias