[fpc-devel] Memory consumed by strings

[Marco van de Voort]

In our previous episode, listmember said:
> The last time I joined a relevant discussion, I was told worrying about 
> native UCS-4 string-type would be pointless simply because that sort of 
> thing is really needed for word processors only.
> 
> Now, I have been informed that Lazarus (and perhaps other IDEs) use 
> upwards of 50 MB string space just to do one of their basic operations.
> 
> That leaves me wondering how much do we lose performance-wise in 
> endlessly decompressing UTF-8 data, instead of using, say, UCS-4 strings.

If you leave about character composition you don't need to for e.g. an often
used primitives like "compare an identifier"