[fpc-devel] Performance of string handling in trunk

[Michael Schnell]

On 06/27/2013 01:24 PM, Sven Barth wrote:
> Delphi uses "String" as type for the "TStringList" and thus with 
> Delphi 2009 and newer this is "UnicodeString".
>

I did assume this.

As I don't have a new Delphi I in turn don't know what exactly 
"UnicodeString" means.

 From what I read I assume this means "System Encoding" and this again 
means UTF-16 or UCS2.

And if all this is true,  when storing a - say UTF-8 - String in a 
stringlist and retrieving it later to a String variable with encoding 
type UTF-8 a dual conversion is done.

To me this seems absolutely silly.

It might be acceptable with Delhi that is Windows-centric and in fact 
depreciates the use of codes other than the "System Encoding"

With a cross-platform tool such as fpc, a smarter (though compatible) 
implementation should be provided.

-Michael