[fpc-devel] String and UnicodeString and UTF8String

[Jeff Wormsley]

On 01/11/2011 11:10 AM, Hans-Peter Diettrich wrote:
>
> UTF-8 combines an single (byte-based) storage type with lossless 
> encoding of full Unicode. Ansi and UCS2 (really UTF-16) only *look* 
> easier to handle in user code, but both will fail and require special 
> code whenever characters outside the assumed codepage may occur.

Preface: I don't write international apps, and probably won't for the 
foreseeable future...

Isn't all of this concentration on trying to make strings have single 
byte characters (who cares how they are encoded), using the argument 
that it is somehow faster, incorrect for just about any modern 
processor, including embedded CPU's such as ARM?  It was my 
understanding that 32 bit aligned access was always faster than byte 
aligned access on just about any CPU FPC still supports.

The argument holds just fine for memory, but I don't really get the 
speed argument.  Maybe I'm missing something.

Jeff.