In our previous episode, Hans-Peter Diettrich said: > >> and component libraries to the new strings, RTL and LCL? IMO a typical > >> loose-loose situation :-( > > > > ? No, the old RTL will remain maintained. It's the same codebase, just > > recompiled. > > Sorry, I doubt that it is so easy :-(
Just a quick memory dump (as said it has been 6months since issues like this were discussed in depth): It is not a blind recompile of course. Everywhere where character access is done has to be reviewed. But any FPC rtl has some 2-byte and 1-byte support, so the amount of code to be added is not that much. At least not till e.g. compiler structures like RTTI will follow. Like always with Delphi compatibility, the level of compatibility differs greatly with what you expect. Usually first the main support is added (the ability to have unicodestring as a basetype for RTL and class hierarchy), other things follow later. That is something else then being fully D2009 compatible. So initially there will probably conversions when you pass a string to units that have many stringroutines (like dateutils,strutils, sysutils, fmtbcd etc), new utility units in Delphi will be missing etc. But I hope it will be enough to allow Lazarus (and other big projects) to start working on conversion. The process then continues (with every issue discussed, checked and doublechecked) with the other remaining defects, and probably some effort will need to be made to kill excessive conversions (like on windows utf16 -> utf8 -> utf16), RTTI, Literals (if delphi literals are utf8, it will probably be only a matter of time till a bug is found because sb is poking with pointers in it), new delphi units etc etc. You can also imagine that just the task of checking and fixing the windows headers for all $ifdef unicode cases is daunting. (we are still fixing heaps of 64-bit issues in them, 9 years after the initial 64-bit port) The current logical next step is to start revising the OS interface to be unicode, mainly on Windows. That alone (the fact that the windows unit swaps to unicode calls by default) is a horrible incompatible change. _______________________________________________ fpc-devel maillist - fpc-devel@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-devel
