What to Expect in Delphi Unicode Support

Allen Bauer has a series of great blog posts (with more to come now doubt) outlining some of the technical details of what to expect with the new changes to support Unicode in the upcoming Tiburon version of Delphi.

• An intro to what to expect
• A great one on Unicode Character Categorization.
• Will there be a switch to turn String back to AnsiString? (Hint: No)
• More FAQ's about Unicode

So what is the reaction? Some people are grumpy that some of their code might break. Delphi has a long history of backwards compatibility. I am sure CodeGear will do what they can to make as much code as possible work, but this looks like it might cause some problems if you ever made assumptions about the size of a Char (which was generally discouraged) or used a string to store non-text (Which I am VERY guilty of. They are just so dang useful!) Personally I am really looking forward to Unicode in Delphi, even if there are a few growing pains.