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Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 16:33:06 -0700
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Where are we ACTUALLY on Unicode?
From: stas@zend.com (Stanislav Malyshev)

Hi!

> What I am probably asking is what was the brick wall PHP6 hit. I was
> under the impression that there was no agreement on 'switchable or only'
> to unicode core? ( And those who did write PHP6 books seemed to have
> their own views on which way the discussions would go ;) ).

 From what I can see, the biggest issues are these:
1. Performance - Unicode-based PHP right now requires tons of 
conversions when talking to outside world (like MySQL) which slows down 
the app significantly. Many extensions frequently used by PHP app 
writers (such as mysql, pcre, etc.) do not support UTF-16 properly. 
Also, inflated memory usage hurts scalability a lot.
2. Compatibility - it's hard to make existing app works with Unicode and 
doesn't lose in performance or doesn't have any weird scenarios where 
your passwords suddenly stop working because there's an extra recoding 
step in some md5() call.
-- 
Stanislav Malyshev, Zend Software Architect
stas@zend.com   http://www.zend.com/
(408)253-8829   MSN: stas@zend.com