From: Richard Conroy <richard.conroy@...>
Date: 2007-06-01T18:50:49+09:00
Subject: Re: Unicode roadmap?

On 5/31/07, Ivan Mashchenko <ivan.mashchenko@gmail.com> wrote:
> Finally, is there a convenient support for Unicode in Ruby? Or, if not,
> when will it be?

It depends on your definition of 'convenient'.

The short answer is that unicode applications can be made in Ruby,
particularly Web Apps. It is not especially difficult, but it is not
'for free' or seamless. You generally have to use an encoding-aware
string type, or modify the existing string class to support multi-byte
characters.

A longer answer would contain references to the fact that there are
multiple options here, that web apps (Rails in particular) are ahead
of pure Ruby in terms of Unicode, and that there are actually a lot
of projects to investigate.

The hardest part of Ruby and Unicode is that not all of the libraries
support it, or that some of the meta-hackery to the string class
could break libraries that expect chars.length to equal bytes.length
(there are other examples). Some of the more popular libraries are
like this, or they inherit the encoding from your O/S settings and
cannot be driven from an API.

> I am going to develop an international website (with pages in some
> european languages, including those using non-latin alphabets). I think
> it should prove to be a good idea to make such a website totally in
> Unicode (probably UTF-16), without using any legacy encodings at all.

Well yes, but I would use UTF-8 instead. Its Unicode designed for the
web (and UTF-16 is a bit wierd in some ways - there are at least 3 kinds
of UTF-16 that I am aware of).

Rails 1.2 introduced some pretty impressive support for Unicode in the
last release, all of the major i18n plugins should be compatible with
these changes by now.

> As well I would like to ask when the next Ruby release is planned to. If
> it comes this year, I should probably try nightly builds as it seems to
> be wise to start a new project targeting ea version of the next release.

AFAIK there is no release schedule. YARV is basically Ruby 1.9, and it
is scheduled for release around the end of the year. However there is no
firm commitment to make it the next Ruby version. Also Ruby 1.9 is going
to break/deprecate stuff - I wouldn't develop against it, it will be a
rough experience.
Ruby 1.9 is kind of a staging release; migrating from 1.8 -> 1.9 is going
to be tricky, but 1.9 -> 2.0 should be a drop in; that the intention - isolate
the biggest changes to the 1.9 release.

If you are moving to Ruby 1.9, do it with a complete working application.
Or better still, develop against Rails versions, not Ruby versions. Let the
Rails team figure out the best Ruby migration strategy for you.