Re: [boost] [rfc] Unicode GSoC project

Subject: Re: [boost] [rfc] Unicode GSoC project
From: Graham (Graham_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-05-15 18:34:55

>What kind of real-world use do people have for random access, anyways?
>Even UTF-32 isn't random access for the things I can think of that
>people would care about, what with combining codepoints and ligatures
>and other such things.
I wrote a couple of Unicode text editors that would have been a
nightmare if they had not been operating on UTF-32.

>As an aside, I'd like to see comparisons between compressed UTF-8 and
>compressed UTF-16, since neither one is random-access anyways, and it
>seems to me that caring about size of text before compression is about
>as important as the performance of a program with the optimizer turned
>off.
Actually in a few cases I have seen it is not the compressed size but
the conversion performance [memory/CPU] that hurts. It is much better to
get the correct encoding for the correct use case.

Yours,
Graham