[fpc-devel] new string - question on usage

[Jonas Maebe]

On 12 Oct 2011, at 14:17, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:

> eg: UTF-8 as native string type under *nix systems, and
> UTF-16 under Windows. Why must some platforms get a speed penalty and
> others not, when you force only one encoding on all platforms?

The reason for doing so would be to make code more easily portable.  
Many frameworks use UTF-16 everywhere, from MSE to WxWidgets to Qt to  
Java to Mac OS X' system frameworks (even though at the unix/posix  
interface level, Mac OS X is also utf-8). That does not mean we have  
to do the same, but neither is such a choice per definition guided by  
being Windows-centric.

The main issue with the RTL is however, as far as I am concerned, not  
that on some platforms an extra string conversion may be required here  
or there, but compatibility with code written for D2009 and later, and  
with code written for earlier Delphi/FPC versions.


Jonas