Benefits of Character Set Portability
| Unicode Tasks | Multibyte 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