[Mono-list] Announce: getting Unicode to work on Win9x with libunicows

[Vaclav Slavik]

Hello,

I don't know what's current status of Unicode support in Mono project, 
but it seems from the archives that there's a Unicode-on-Win9x 
wrapper in use (http://mono.eurosoft.od.ua/files/unimono.zip, 
"unicode wrapper" thread on this list). I'd like to draw your 
attention to another implementation of unicows.dll wrapper which has 
several advantages:
- it doesn't require any source code modifications 
  (no #include "unimono.h")
- its only a static import library, no more DLLs are needed 
- is partially implemented in assembler and there's *no* runtime
  overhead when compared to an Unicode app that doesn't use libunicows

Bellow is the original announcement:
-----------------------------------------------

Version 0.5 of libunicows, a compiler-independent open source 
implementation of MSLU import library, was released and is available 
for download from http://libunicows.sourceforge.net. Precompiled 
binaries for Visual C++ and Mingw32 are included (help with other 
compilers is wanted).

MSLU (The Microsoft Layer for Unicode on Windows® 95/98/ME Systems) is 
a compatibility layer that makes it possible to run Unicode 
applications on Windows 9x systems (previously, Unicode APIs were 
only available on Windows NT/2000; see 
http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/Articles/mslu_announce.asp for 
details). Necessary runtime DLLs can be downloaded from 
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/release.asp?releaseid=30039

MSLU requires that you use a special statically-linked import library 
that is currently only provided for Microsoft Visual C++ and only as 
a part of the (rather large) new Platform SDK. Libunicows addresses 
both of these problems by being small and available in source code 
form.

Best regards,
Vaclav Slavik