Qt, MSVC, and /Zc:wchar_t- == I want to blow up the world

I would agree with Öö Tiib's remark

That option is perhaps for compatibility with some old legacy pre-wchar_t code.

Having in mind that Qt is ported to many different platforms (including embedded systems), some of them not having a decent C++ compiler, I would guess that this switch is just to make it possible to compile Qt on those platforms. I mean it's probably not something that Qt relies on to work correctly. If it were the case it would mean that Qt's design is deeply broken in my opinion. So option 1 should work.

Having said that I would definitely recommend choosing option 3 because

• wchar_t gives you almost nothing in regard to i18n
• as you noticed Qt has very capable string class which makes i18n an easy task (see Internationalization with Qt)

You might take a look at results of searching for wchar_t on [email protected] list, ask your question there and talk to Thiago Macieira on freenode.net #qt irc channel where Thiago is very active.

Stumbled over the same issue ... Obviously bjam expects cxxflags=-Zcwchar_t-

After building the static serialization libs via

bjam --with-serialization toolset=msvc-8.0 variant=debug threading=multi link=static cxxflags=-Zc:wchar_t-

everything linked like expected.

Hope this helps anyone.