Hi All, > On Dec 14, 2015, at 7:23 AM, Richard Sargent > <richard.sarg...@gemtalksystems.com> wrote: > > EuanM wrote >> Hi Todd, it's taken me til now to put my thoughts into words on this >> issue. >> >> I think we should make it work first. This will allow us to gain more >> insight into the issues, and create documentation about the process >> that we, as a community, understand. >> >> If ICU is the right way to go, we can *then* "make it right". > > One way to cross the Grand Canyon is to climb down the wall, assemble the > materials to build a bridge, build the bridge, cross it, then clamber up the > wall. One would learn a lot about climbing and bridge building, worthwhile > if the goal is to learn about those subjects. > > Alternatively, you could use the highway bridge that was built long ago and > just cross to the other side. This is definitely my inclination. >
Using ICU is a disaster at least for the VM. It means we cannot simulate an important part of the system without being able to call ICU from within the simulator. It means bugs in Unicode can potentially cause hard crashes in c++ code, destroying the perfectly safe VM simulation environment /and/ the perfectly safe Smalltalk string library. Goodbye debugger hello gdb. It means having a dependency on a large c++ library for a core part of the system, with all that entails about more complex builds, portability, etc. It means opacity in a core part of the system. This move will be a terrible mistake. >> On 8 December 2015 at 22:36, Todd Blanchard < > >> tblanchard@ > >> > wrote: >>> I just want to second Dale's endorsement of the ICU library. It has been >>> around a long time (originally developed by Taligent) and it provides the >>> base unicode capabilities for an awful lot of software. >>> >>> I think it would make more sense to bring icu into Smalltalk as a >>> NativeBoost library than to spend resources reimplementing and >>> maintaining >>> it. >>> >>> -Todd Blanchard >>> >>> On Dec 8, 2015, at 11:20, Dale Henrichs < > >> dale.henrichs@ > >> > >>> wrote: >>> >>> On 12/07/2015 11:31 PM, H. Hirzel wrote: >>> >>> Dale >>> >>> Thank you for your answer with links to the ICU library and the notes >>> about classes in Gemstone. Noteworthy that you have a class Utf8 as a >>> subclass of ByteArray. >>> >>> I understand that Gemstone uses the ICU library and thus does not >>> implement the algorithms in Smalltalk. >>> >>> I am currently looking into what the ICU library provides. > > > > > > -- > View this message in context: > http://forum.world.st/Sorting-Unicode-strings-Re-Unicode-collation-sequences-Re-squeak-dev-Unicode-Support-tp4865876p4866992.html > Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Developers mailing list archive at Nabble.com. >
