RE: Canonical equivalence in rendering: mandatory or recommended?

[Jill Ramonsky]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Peter Kirk [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Wednesday, October 15, 2003 12:19 PM
> To: Unicode List
> Subject: Canonical equivalence in rendering: mandatory or recommended?
>
>
> Does everyone agree that "This is not a performance issue"?

In my experience, there is a performance hit.

I had to write an API for my employer last year to handle some aspects of Unicode. We normalised everything to NFD, not NFC (but that's easier, not harder). Nonetheless, all the string handling routines were not allowed to assume that the input was in NFD, but they had to guarantee that the output was. These routines, therefore, had to do a "convert to NFD" on every input, even if the input were already in NFD. This did have a significant performance hit, since we were handling (Unicode) strings throughout the app.

I think that next time I write a similar API, I wll deal with (string+bool) pairs, instead of plain strings, with the bool  meaning "already normalised". This would definitely speed things up. Of course, for any strings coming in from "outside", I'd still have to assume they were not normalised, just in case.

Jill