Re: Interest in a Unicode library for Boost?

From: David Demelier (markand_at_[hidden])
Date: 2019-10-28 08:35:28

Le 26/10/2019 à 03:11, Zach Laine via Boost-users a écrit :
> About 14 months ago I posted the same thing.  There was significant work 
> that needed to be done to Boost.Text (the proposed library), and I was a 
> bit burned out.
> 
> Now I've managed to make the necessary changes, and I feel the library 
> is ready for review, if there is interest.
> 
> This library, in part, is something I want to standardize.
> 
> It started as a better string library for namespace "std2", with minimal 
> Unicode support.  Though "std2" will almost certainly never happen now, 
> those string types are still in there, and the library has grown to also 
> include all the Unicode features most users will ever need.
> 
> Github: https://github.com/tzlaine/text
> Online docs: https://tzlaine.github.io/text

I've read the intro on why is std::string so bad and I have to disagree 
with many points.

1. The Fat Interface

In which way is std::string bloat? Of course some functions are probably 
here as synonymous but to say it's bloat is kinda false. Just look at 
Java's String numerous functions instead [0].

And I

2. The Missing Unicode Support

Yes, many newcomers may be surprised to see that a string "é" has a size 
of 2 bytes (assuming UTF-8). But it's also the case of UTF-16 strings 
which may have surrotage pairs...

UTF-8 is the way to go and effectively stored. One could argue that we 
should have some utf8 iterators or things like that. But std::string is 
still a good candidate for string manipulations.

3. Miscellaneous Limitations

Not thread-safe being an issue? Thanks god it is not. Imagine the 
overhead of a threadsafe version of a string. The purpose of a library 
is not to be threadsafe on every objects. This has to be on the user side.

That said, I really hope for a better unicode support in std:: in the 
near future. Your library is well designed and API is clean, I hope it 
could be added in Boost :-).

[0]: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/lang/String.html