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Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2014 17:10:25 +0100
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [php6] Unicode support, options?
From: ivan.enderlin@hoa-project.net ("Ivan Enderlin @ Hoa")

On 20/02/2014 06:54, Pierre Joye wrote:
> hi,
Hello :-),


> Unicode still remains one of the top requested features in PHP.
>
> However as Rasmus and other stated earlier, it is not a trivial job.
> Some of the keys point we need to take care of are:
>
> - UTF-8 storage
> - UTF-8 support for almost (if not all) existing string APIs
> - Performance
>
> As of today, I did not find any library covering at least two of these
> key points.
>
> [snip]
>
> I would like to begin to discuss our option now already. I am not
> asking to get in all implementation details from a userland point of
> view (like u"some text" or addng new APIs or not) but only to see what
> we can do internally to work with UTF-8 string.
Just a little note: using a `u"foobar"` syntax would help to switch from 
one to another light or heavy implementation internally, and thus, it 
would help to cover at least two of the key points described above.

I would mention the Rust implementation of UTF-8 strings [1, 2]. It's 
fast, it's safe and it has a nice large API. I don't say I want to see 
PHP using Rust. I think it would be hard to do (even if it will 
certainly benefit PHP), but the algorithms they used can be a source of 
inspiration for us. Maybe we should consider it if we decide to have our 
own implementation instead of using a third library.


Cheers.

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/rust/blob/master/src/libstd/str.rs
[2] http://static.rust-lang.org/doc/master/std/str/index.html

-- 
Ivan Enderlin
Developer of Hoa
http://hoa-project.net/

PhD. student at DISC/Femto-ST (Vesontio) and INRIA (Cassis)
http://disc.univ-fcomte.fr/ and http://www.inria.fr/

Member of HTML and WebApps Working Group of W3C
http://w3.org/