Re: [text] Comparison with Unicode features of Boost.Locale

From: Zach Laine (whatwasthataddress_at_[hidden])
Date: 2020-06-16 20:12:35

On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 1:22 PM Phil Endecott via Boost
<boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>
> Dear Zach & others,
>
> Boost already has some Unicode functionality in Boost.Locale.
> Would you like to compare the pros/cons of each?

Sure.  I was about to reply that they are unrelated, and that's mostly
true.  However, looking again at Boost.Locale, I see that I forgot
that it does do some of the same things.

Boost.Locale is concerned with the locale system from C, the
iostreams-related locale stuff, and iostreams themselves.  All that is
completely unrelated to what Boost.Text does, which is: strings and
ropes (though the strings are probably going away after the review),
all the named Unicode algorithms, and text (string-like types that
maintain Unicode invariants).

What they do have in common is case conversion, Unicode normalization,
collation, and text segmentation (word breaks, etc.).  So, there is
some overlap, but not a lot, when you consider the feature sets of the
respective libraries.

Where they do overlap, here are the differences:

Locale uses ICU directly, so there is an ICU dependency.
Locale's (read: ICU's) collation is faster than Text's.  Text is
faster at everything else.
Locale seems to be based around char and wchar_t.  Text is fully generic.

Again, that only represents a somewhat small part of either library.
There is not that much overlap.

Zach