I am currently implementing Unicode support throughout the SDK. I decided to adopt UTF-8 as the standard encoding for all Ecere API calls as well as the encoding for string literals inside eC files. UTF-8 is wonderfully transparent as it is fully compatible with ASCII. This avoids the nightmare of having two copies of every API such as in the Windows API which decided to adopt UTF-16. String literals in eC can be written without any prefix such as T”string” or L”string”, a fact I really appreciate.
Unicode on Windows is now fully functional, including:
- Text output
- International text entry
- Complex scripts such as Devanagari
- Right to left such as Arabic and Hebrew
- Support in 3D video modes (OpenGL / Direct3D)
Now moving on to making Unicode work on Linux, as well as improving general support for the OS.