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

[Patrick Gansterer]

On 05.10.2013, at 19:13, Brent Fulgham wrote:

> The WinCairo port is as close to the AppleWin port as possible. It uses ICU and I have no intention of changing that.
> 
> The WinCE port is maintained by Patrick Gangsterer. I believe that this port does not want to use ICU, preferring to use the limited subset of i18n features provided by the operating system.

That's correct, but I think that changing the current API to ICU and implement some stub functions instead is a good idea.
Can we put the source code of this "dummy-ICU" somewhere into the tree?
See also the discussion about a reduced ICU at [1], but this would require a big copy of the ICU code in the tree, which I don't see as a good idea.

> I have heard from a number of people, mainly using WebKit in resource constrained environments, who prefer to omit ICU due to its relatively large footprint. But many of their concerns about library size might be satisfied by rebuilding ICU with settings that omit the large encoding database. This makes sense if their use cases do not need these features.

If you use WebKit e.g. as a simple english-only GUI without text-input there is no need for ICU, expect to compile the remaining code. So a "dummy-ICU" would be everything you need for this use-case and reduces the required resources

> -Brent
> 
> Sent from my iPad
> 
>> On Oct 4, 2013, at 11:48 PM, Dirk Schulze <dschulze at adobe.com> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>> On Oct 5, 2013, at 7:37 AM, Darin Adler <darin at apple.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Any thoughts on this? I am not sure what the status of the WinCE port is, but I’d like to hear from the maintainers of that port on the port status and their view on this strategy.
>> 
>> Do you really mean WinCE or WinCairo? I thought that WinCE was discontinued a long time ago and already removed. Probably I was wrong.
>> 
>> Greetings,
>> Dirk

-- Patrick

[1] https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2013-June/025018.html