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

[Marco van de Voort]

In our previous episode, Daniël Mantione said:
> > as I know D2009 (I think) handles this correctly, but I have no idea
> > how.
> 
> Let me put it like this: Someone writing a Russian/Arabic/Japanese spell 
> checker does not have to handle surrogates with UTF-16, but he does with 
> UTF-8, i.e. UTF-16 is much better for them than UTF-8.

Are you sure? There is a CJK plane above $FFFF. Afaik these are non
simplified glyphs used for titles etc. Less than normal script, but not that
rare.
 
> Someone writing a spell checker for old-Egyptian Hieroglyphs will have to 
> deal with surrogates. For those people UTF-16 has few advantages over 
> UTF-8, (allthough in practice it's still a bit easier to handle than UTF-8).

IMHO such assumptions can be made for end user businesscode. (and only if the CJK
pages above $FFFF are ancient and not in modern use), however the RTL and
other libraries should be simply unicode complaint. Period.