Joshua Gatcomb wrote: > Dan Sugalski <dan at sidhe dot org> wrote: > > ... and therefore ICU will continue to stay in CVS as part of > > parrot. Period. > > > > The alternative here is the same alternative as with GMP and big > > numbers--we can yank ICU *if* someone writes an alternate Unicode > > implementation for us. > > The following comments aren't directed at you Dan, just my personal > opinion on ICU. > > ICU is giving Parrot a black eye. The ICU we have in CVS right now > is really old and broken. We are shipping a "bare bones" version > of ICU that doesn't build very easily anywhere.
This sounds familiar. There was a Wine project interview with Wine's internationalization guy, Shachar Shemesh a couple weeks back: http://www.winehq.com/?interview=16 > Shachar: ICU has all the BiDi support we will ever need. > Well, almost - it will probably be too hard to make it > more MS BiDi compatible, but that is not a major issue. > What is a major issue with ICU is that it is an entire > Unicode implementation. This means it has lots and lots > of stuff that Wine does itself. For example - GDI without > BiDi support is ~2MB. With BiDi support from ICU > statically linked, after ICU has been trimmed of all the > easy-to-remove stuff, it grows to ~4MB. Without this > trimming, it grows an additional 7MB to 11MB! Don't > forget that GDI neither uses nor needs most of that code. > > I guess things would not be so bad if you could just say > "I'll just dynamically link it". For all practical > purposes, you can't. As a design decision, ICU has the > library version mangled into each function name. This > means that you have to have the same version installed > on the machine as the one you compiled with, or it won't > be usable. As a byproduct of this, nobody uses ICU > dynamically. Both Mozilla and OpenOffice use ICU for > their reordering, and both of them statically link it. As > a byproduct of that, almost no distro carries ICU, or > carry a very old version of it. In short, I would like to > ditch ICU as soon as possible. -- Garrett Goebel IS Development Specialist ScriptPro Direct: 913.403.5261 5828 Reeds Road Main: 913.384.1008 Mission, KS 66202 Fax: 913.384.2180 www.scriptpro.com garrett at scriptpro dot com
