Have to say, it is always a pain to deal with charset and encoding while doing development, especially on Windows.
On Linux things are sort of easy though sometime you still need to tweak things, usually I keep everything in UTF8 – source, messages, text files, etc. It may waste some disk spaces (come on, who cares), but it’s way easy to be compatible with every other tools I’m using.
Now back to Windows – by design everything should be Unicode in modern Windows, I think it started from Windows XP or so, but at least Windows Vista should fully support Unicode, isn’t it? However, there are codepage setting for some applications, and you actually cannot control end user’s environment thus make it really hard to build a software that can run on different Windows.
I’m not an expert on this kind of l10n/i18n issue, but I have to face the problem as I’m coding. With gnat-gps, I now set editor etc. to GB2312, with fonts set to some Simplified Chinese fonts, and then make sure the “Command Prompt” uses GB2312/GBK, then I can use Chinese as comment in source file, also I’m able to output Chinese messages in command window.
I’m going to do some Win32 application so command line is not enough, let’s see how far I can go.