Re: Interest in a Unicode library for Boost?

From: Leon Mlakar (leon_at_[hidden])
Date: 2019-10-29 10:11:14

On 26.10.2019 03:11, Zach Laine via Boost-users wrote:
> 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
>
> If you care about portable Unicode support, or even addressing the 
> embarrassment of being the only major production language with next to 
> no Unicode support, please have a look and provide feedback.

Puuting an issue of standardization aside, I certainly would love to see 
something like that included in Boost. After a quick read of you docs 
(about an hour), I'm not sure I'm happy with all the choices you've made 
(see some remarks below) but overall I see it as something I would use 
in the future. As you wrote, Unicode is hard, even with a library like 
this; nearly mission impossible without.

Few remarks, for all their worth:

- I've never seen std::string and thread (un)safety as an issue

- pattern if (x == npos) is now so common that is imho important to 
preserve it

- for the sake of completeness the normalization type used at the text 
level ought to be a policy parameter; although I do understand your 
arguments against it I think it should be there even at the cost of 
different text types being inoperable without conversions

- at the text level I'm not sure I'm willing to cope with different 
fundamental text types; I just want to use boost::text::text, pretty 
much the same as I use std::string as an alias to much more complex 
class template; heck, even at the string layer I'd probably prefer 
rope/contiguous concept to be a policy parameter to the same type template.

- views should be introduced as views and not mixed with rope/contiguous 
fundamental types

Hats off for the excellent work, though!

Leon