[fpc-devel] Is calling the Windows Unicode APIs really faster than the ANSI API's?

JoshyFun joshyfun at gmail.com
Thu Sep 25 23:17:58 CEST 2008


Hello Graeme,

Thursday, September 25, 2008, 9:50:04 PM, you wrote:

GG> Yes I know we have had lengthy discussions about this before.
GG> Everybody (whoever they might be) keeps saying that UTF-16 was chosen
GG> for Tiburon's UnicodeString because it makes "significant speed gains"
GG> when calling the Windows API based on UTF-16 - compared to the ANSI
GG> API's. The whole debate goes that you wouldn't need constant
GG> conversions between ANSI->UTF-16->ANSI.  Now it seems Free Pascal
GG> developers want to base their design on those results as well (yes,
GG> plus the whole compatibility thing)

They are not talking about ANSI strings (they are not Unicode
compatibles) but UTF-8 strings. So the choose is UTF8 or UTF16 (or
UCS32 of course) and in Windows UTF16 is faster as do not need
conversion to call the API, zero time against any amount of time. Of
course in other OS the things changes.

-- 
Best regards,
 JoshyFun




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