Is TCHAR still relevant?

c++ c windows unicode wchar-t
Fábio picture Fábio · Oct 24, 2008 · Viewed 38.6k times · Source

I'm new to Windows programming and after reading the Petzold book I wonder:

is it still good practice to use the TCHAR type and the _T() function to declare strings or if I should just use the wchar_t and L"" strings in new code?

I will target only Windows 2000 and up and my code will be i18n from the start up.

Answer

Sascha picture Sascha · Nov 26, 2008

The short answer: NO.

Like all the others already wrote, a lot of programmers still use TCHARs and the corresponding functions. In my humble opinion the whole concept was a bad idea. UTF-16 string processing is a lot different than simple ASCII/MBCS string processing. If you use the same algorithms/functions with both of them (this is what the TCHAR idea is based on!), you get very bad performance on the UTF-16 version if you are doing a little bit more than simple string concatenation (like parsing etc.). The main reason are Surrogates.

With the sole exception when you really have to compile your application for a system which doesn't support Unicode I see no reason to use this baggage from the past in a new application.

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