Comment by rixed
16 hours ago
I was currious to see what that data consisted of and aparently that's a lot of translations, like the name of all possible calendar formats in all possible languages, etc. This seems useless in the vast majority of use cases, including that of a JS interpreter. Looks to me like the typical output of a comitee that's looking too hard to extend its domain.
Disclaimer: I never liked unicode specs.
Unicode is an attempt to encode the world's languages: there is not much to like or dislike about it, it only represents the reality. Sure, it has a number of weird details, butnif anything, it's due to the desire to simplify it (like Han unification or normal forms).
Any language runtime wanting to provide date/time and string parsing functions needs access to the Unicode database (or something of comparable complexity and size).
Saying "I don't like Unicode" is like saying "I don't like the linguistic diversity in the world": I mean sure, OK, but it's still there and it exists.
Though note that date-time, currency, number, street etc. formatting is not "Unicode" even if provided by ICU: this is similarly defined by POSIX as "locales", anf GNU libc probably has the richest collection of locales outside of ICU.
There are also many non-Unicode collation tables (think phonebook ordering that's different for each country and language): so no good sort() without those either.
Does that include emojis?
Emojis are complicated from a font rendering perspective. But from a string processing perspective, they're generally going to be among the simplest characters: they don't have a lot of complex properties with a lot of variation between individual characters. Compare something like the basic Latin characters, where the mappings for precomposed characters are going to vary wildly from 'a' to 'b' to 'c', etc., whereas the list of precomposed characters for the emoji blocks amounts to "none."
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