>> That is not the philosophy behind the FB.
>
> It was told that UTF8 is bad charset for default network connection for in worse case it would sent 4 bytes instead of 1.
>
> I am not concerned about long-distance limited-bandwidth or paid-per-traffic connections though i agree there probably are people who use it.

UTF-8 works fine for all latin-based charsets, it is bad for Cyrillic -
those would take 2 bytes instead of 1 byte. Others will take 2-3 bytes
anyway.

>> It would require your Delphi installation to depend on ICU libraries,
>
> Modern Windows do have their own unicode databases.

Firebird uses ICU.

>> - All clients are able to consume data in UTF-8. Period. All Delphi
>> users will cry when they start to convert Unicode strings to SBCS and back.
>
> The would not. Conversion would be encapsulated either inside fbclient.dll or at data access components level.
> Also don't forget that since Delphi 2009 it is already using UTF16 (or maybe UCS-2) strings. So currently all modern Delphi users do conversion SBCS string to Unicode and back. Now they would convert Unicode to Unicode. Big deal ;-)

If all Delphi strings are Unicode already, then it makes sense to make
Unicode default for all cases :)

I sent a proposal to firebird-devel, let's see what will happen.

Roman