[Nautilus-list] Re: About wchar support.

[Darin Adler <darin bentspoon com>]

On Thursday, June 14, 2001, at 06:24  AM, James Su wrote:

>    If we use UTF-8 or char*, we cannot handle the string directly. Like 
> my patch, we must do lots of mbs<->wcs convertion in many functions. It 
> will increase the program's complexity and affect its performance.

You're lecturing to the wrong guy. The decision to use UTF-8 for GNOME 2 
is and was made by the GTK team, who hang out on the gtk-devel-list.

If there are particular places where the conversion between UTF-8 and a 
uniform-width character encoding turns out to be a bottleneck, we can 
consider changing the program to keep things in the uniform-width coding 
and convert to UTF-8 only when needed. But I'd need actual performance 
data to make that change, not merely the theoretical idea that it would be 
faster. In anything but the most text-intensive programs I suspect the 
real bottlenecks would be elsewhere.

But please don't waste your time and mine by debating this point further 
with me, since I'll just go with what the GNOME 2 project as a whole 
decides.

    -- Darin