[fpc-pascal] FPC + Mobile development: the String type

[Jonas Maebe]

On 10 Jul 2014, at 14:39, Marco van de Voort wrote:

> In our previous episode, leledumbo said:
>> I hope so, and with Delphi plans on making strings immutable in the  
>> future,
>> I hope FPC doesn't follow.
>
> (doesn't it already for the jvm port?)

No, but changing an individual character of a unicodestring is  
obviously very inefficient there. Changing an individual character of  
an ansistring however is just as inefficient on the JVM target,  
because there's no way to keep track of or request the reference count  
at the RTL level, so we always have to make a deep copy.

Many of those cases, especially the critical ones in tight loops, can  
in theory be optimised by the compiler (which would also result in a  
speedup on other platforms, because it would eliminate a lot of  
automatically inserted uniquestring calls), but there's no support for  
that yet.


Jonas