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

[Florian Klaempfl]

Graeme Geldenhuys schrieb:
> On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 10:33 PM, Florian Klaempfl
> <florian at freepascal.org> wrote:
>> Who says that? UTF-16 is simply chosen because it has features (supporting
>> all characters basically) ANSI doesn't?
> 
> Sorry, my message was unclear and I got somewhat mixed up between ANSI
> and UTF-8. I meant the encoding type of String or UnicodeString being
> UTF-16 instead of UTF-8.  The CodeGear newsgroups are full of people
> saying that UTF-16 was chosen because they could call the 'W' api's
> without needing a conversion.
> 
> My question is, has anybody actually seen the speed difference (actual
> timing results) showing UTF-16 string calling 'W' api's compared to
> UTF-8->UTF-16 and then calling the 'W' api's.  With today's computers,
> I can't imagine that there would be a "significant speed loss" using
> such conversions. The speed difference might be milliseconds, but
> that's not really "significant speed loss" is it?

Windows has no utf-8 string processing routines so any case conversion,
comparision whatever needs an utf-8 -> utf-16 conversion.