Re: ActiveSupport::Multibyte for better Unicode support

On 26 Sep 2006, at 19:02 , Charles O Nutter wrote:
> [...] Native JRuby support for MultiByte could potentially be  
> significantly
> faster than a pure Ruby version, but fully API-equivalent.

Finally a good reason to run Rails on Java! :-)

> - We've been kicking around the possibility of migrating to a mutable
> UTF-8 string inside JRuby, to avoid the wasted high byte and to get
> all our mutability in a single type that's friendlier than what Java
> provides. If we could say that the base JRuby String implementation
> supports a fast, solid UTF-8 backing store normally and MultiByte's
> String#chars and Chars for actual multibyte operations I think we'd
> have the best of all worlds

Sounds like the way to go to me. UTF-8 is what Ruby has (although  
limited) built-in support for and for most Rails apps it's what you  
have to convert to in the end anyway.

Please not that ActiveSupport::Multibyte support all Unicode planes  
and not only the Basic Multilingual Plane. My knowledge of Java is  
very limited, but judging from the article at [1] working with  
anything beyond U+FFFF takes some serious effort.

Kind regards,
Thijs

[1] http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Intl/Supplementary/

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