ANSI v.s. Wide

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

Quote:

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Originally Posted by audinue

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

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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.

Quote:

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...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?

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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.

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.

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.

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.