[criddell]

I went through that a few years ago and it actually went pretty smoothly. There were a few UINT_PTR or DWORD_PTR changes I had to get used to and a couple of string glitches (we mostly used the _T() macro for strings and already used the _t variants of string functions in the original code, so that helped).

The biggest problems were DAO (database) and a few COM controls that were not available in x64.

[NetMageSCW]

Having to use macros for literal strings in your code is just incredibly stupid of Microsoft and/or C++.

[gzread]

How do Linux and Java do it, when you want to compile your program in both 16-bit char and 8-bit char mode? Oh that's right, you don't.

You can pick one or the otherfor Windows too, so don't ask me why it's done that way. It was originally so you could compile for both the new hotness Unicode, and the old compatible ASCII.

[projektfu]

Partly because Microsoft resisted UTF-8 forever, and so using the ANSI/multibyte strings didn't therefore give you modern functionality. Why they didn't implement Unicode for Win95, I'm just not sure. If they had, the only reason to compile an ANSI version would have been to target Win32S (Windows 3.11).

Or, they could have implemented a UTF-8 code page for Win32 as soon as it was available and then most software could just use byte strings.