[webkit-dev] Proposal: Use ICU in WebKit code

[Konstantin Tokarev]

05.10.2013, 09:38, "Darin Adler" <darin at apple.com>:
> Hi folks.
>
> A while back the WebKit project made use of ICU directly. There were some port maintainers who instead wanted to make WebKit work without ICU. At the time, the strategy we pursued was to make a Unicode layer in WTF that layered on top of ICU. We then created multiple implementations of that layer on top of other back ends.

There is an issue with ICU: it uses UTF16 as its internal representation, while most of the Web nowadays is UTF8. Therefore, page text goes through unnecessary encoding conversion, and takes more memory than in UTF8 (for most of languages). So it might be not a good development direction to tie up WebKit to ICU.


-- 
Regards,
Konstantin