audinue

According to another applications bugs using ANSI functions (e.g. fopen, MessageBoxA) in either Microsoft C Runtime Library or Windows API,...

...1. Should we use the Unicode functions (e.g. _wfopen, MessageBoxW) in our program?

...2. It seems ANSI char is unsigned char (1 byte) and Wide-char is unsigned int (4 bytes), and by using wide-char in our application will increase memory consumptions. Will it decrease performance too?

...3. Any suggestion and/or reference for this?

...4. Thanks for joining this thread ^_^

EDIT:
- Wide-char is unsigned short (2 bytes)
- Replaced Wide <-> Unicode

Elysia

Yes, it is recommended to use Unicode, and on Windows, that's Wide characters.
They work with many international characters ANSI does not.
And in these days and times, that's an important thing.

Wide chars are 2 bytes, not 4. It will probably decrease performance, yes, but not on a measurable level, and the advantages of unicode makes it worth that additional speed hit.

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CornedBee

Actually, since the NT WinAPI works with wide strings internally no matter what (and will convert your narrow strings if you pass them to any API function), using wide characters is likely to be faster.

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CornedBee

"There is not now, nor has there ever been, nor will there ever be, any programming language in which it is the least bit difficult to write bad code."
- Flon's Law

cpjust

For production code I'd recommend using Unicode strings, even if you don't have any immediate plans for non-English language support.

For simple test utilities that probably won't be around for very long, ANSI should be fine if you only need English, but Unicode might still be better since you never know when your simple test utility might become popular and used a lot more.

Elysia

Making your application both ANSI/Unicode safe from the start is what I do.
Using TCHAR and _T or TEXT around your strings will make sure your application will compile as either Unicode or ANSI. Sometimes you may want to switch between the two, and when that moment comes, you'll be fine.

__________________
Using: Microsoft Windows™ 7 Professional (x64), Microsoft Visual Studio™ 2008 Team System
I dedicated my life to helping others. This is only a small sample of what they said:
"Thanks Elysia. You're a programming master! How the hell do you know every thing?"
Quoted... at least once.