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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Where are we ACTUALLY on Unicode?
From: stas@zend.com (Stanislav Malyshev)

Hi!

> On disk storage should probably be UTF-8 without any question? Windows
> use of widestrings for some files simple doubles up the on disk storage

As file content, it's OK (an it'd be easy to add option to specify 
content transformation if we wanted), but prescribing filenames as UTF-8 
would probably be not workable, since different systems (and maybe even 
different filesystems inside same OS?) can have different opinions on that.

> '3' is not a very processor friendly number, so working with 4 even
> though wasteful on memory, does make perfect sense. How long is it since

I'm not sure it does. Most of PHP strings are short, so memory loss 
would be very significant. Also, take into account that CPU caches 
aren't as big as the main memory, and not fitting your data into the 
cache is expensive.

> we had a 640k limit on working memory? SERVERS should have a good amount

It doesn't matter how much memory you have, in numbers. Until we find an 
unlimited source of computer memory left by the aliens in Himalayas, 
memory costs money. It doesn't matter how much memory do you have - 
however many gigs you have, you'll be able to run 3 times less PHP 
processes in new version on the same hardware than in old version, which 
means new PHP would cost you more to run. "Memory is cheap" is a very 
misunderstood expression - it's only cheap if you always have much more 
than you need.

> Probably 90% of the time a string will come in and go out without
> requiring any processing at all, so leave it as UTF-8 ? The only time we

It might be great if we could do that. The problem might be that right 
now AFAIK we don't have a good library to work with utf-8 strings 
(please correct me if I'm wrong here).
-- 
Stanislav Malyshev, Zend Software Architect
stas@zend.com   http://www.zend.com/
(408)253-8829   MSN: stas@zend.com