Benefits of Character Set Portability

Unicode TasksMultibyte Character Set (MBCS) Tasks

You can benefit from using MFC and C run-time portability features even if you don’t currently intend to internationalize your application:

  • Coding portably makes your code base flexible. You can later move it easily to Unicode or MBCS.

  • Using Unicode makes your applications for Windows NT more efficient. Windows NT uses Unicode, so non-Unicode strings passed to and from the operating system must be translated, incurring overhead.

  • Using MBCS enables you to support international markets on Win32 platforms other than Windows NT, such as Windows 95.

See Also   Support for Unicode