[webkit-dev] compact ICU unicode

[Ryosuke Niwa]

On Fri, Jun 7, 2013 at 12:15 PM, Salisbury, Mark <mark.salisbury at hp.com>wrote:
>
> What would people think about including specific ICU data tables in WTF in
> order to provide a lightweight (but functional) unicode implementation?
>

I don't think we want to do that. Maintaining such a table will be a
nightmare for us.

On embedded systems the size of ICU is prohibitive.  Determining the right
> way to package it to make it small enough isn't simple either.
>

It seems like this is a problem with ICU.  I think some Qt port's platform
doesn't use ICU either so you might want to coordinate with their
maintainer to do this.  In fact, WTF had an abstraction layer around ICU to
do this the last time I checked.

WinCE Unicode originally came in here:
> https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=27305.  The reason it was
> introduced was to save space (filesystem and RAM).  ICU, if not packaged
> very carefully (http://userguide.icu-project.org/packaging), is actually
> larger than webkit itself.  On embedded systems, this is a big deal.  The
> original plan with the bug above was to include specific ICU data tables in
> webkit.
>
> I've been compiling WTF with Unicode tables embedded for some time now.  I
> don't believe I've seen many layout test regressions due to using a
> simplified ICU implementation.
>

Have you thoroughly tested your browser in CJK, Hebrew, Arabic, and Thai?
 I don't think we can rely on layout tests to catch all ICU dependencies.

- R. Niwa
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