[fpc-devel] Unicode support (yet again)

[Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho]

On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 11:15 AM, Graeme Geldenhuys
<graemeg.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> in fpGUI:
>   UTF8Copy(...)
>   UTF8CharAtByte(...)
>
> in fpGUI:
>  Length(...)   result is in bytes
>  UTF8Length(...)  result is in "characters"

Well, here we see why I started this thread. fpGUI and the LCL are
implementing things which should be on the RTL ...

But the RTL is not UTF-8 friendly and the result is things like these,
or the worse variants:

// file operations
function FileExistsUTF8(const Filename: string): boolean;
function FileAgeUTF8(const FileName: string): Longint;
function DirectoryExistsUTF8(const Directory: string): Boolean;
function ExpandFileNameUTF8(const FileName: string): string;
function ExpandUNCFileNameUTF8(const FileName: string): string;
function ExtractShortPathNameUTF8(Const FileName : String) : String;
function FindFirstUTF8(const Path: string; Attr: Longint; out Rslt:
TSearchRec): Longint;
function FindNextUTF8(var Rslt: TSearchRec): Longint;
procedure FindCloseUTF8(var F: TSearchrec);
function FileSetDateUTF8(const FileName: String; Age: Longint): Longint;
function FileGetAttrUTF8(const FileName: String): Longint;
function FileSetAttrUTF8(const Filename: String; Attr: longint): Longint;
function DeleteFileUTF8(const FileName: String): Boolean;
function RenameFileUTF8(const OldName, NewName: String): Boolean;
function FileSearchUTF8(const Name, DirList : String;
ImplicitCurrentDir : Boolean = True): String;
function FileIsReadOnlyUTF8(const FileName: String): Boolean;
function GetCurrentDirUTF8: String;
function SetCurrentDirUTF8(const NewDir: String): Boolean;
function CreateDirUTF8(const NewDir: String): Boolean;
function RemoveDirUTF8(const Dir: String): Boolean;
function ForceDirectoriesUTF8(const Dir: string): Boolean;

Lazarus is literally being forced to implement it's own RTL...

With the currently planned Unicode RTL it will just get worse, we will
then need to either migrate to UnicodeString (a lot of work, no
benefit at all) or give up using the RTL at all and simply finish
rolling our own set of functions. We will even need to roll our own
TStringsUTF8, TFileStreamUTF8, etc...

-- 
Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho