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Rust Zürisee, Dec 2022: Next Generation i18n with Rust Using ICU4X
Rust developers can now harness the power of ICU4X for next-generation i18n, leveraging Unicode support, modularity, and memory safety to drive efficient and secure internationalization in modern devices and software.
- Rust provides a new generation of i18n solutions with ICU4X, building on the internationalization requirements of modern devices and software.
- ICU4X is a library that uses Rust and provides Unicode support and handling of international text processing.
- One of the key reasons for the success of ICU4X is its modularity, which allows users to select specific components and functionality that meet their specific needs.
- The project’s main goal is to enable the efficient and secure processing of data, even in the presence of error handling, ensuring that applications run correctly even in the presence of failures.
- Data-driven algorithms, such as ICU4X, require a good data suite to ensure that the required data for each locale is well-covered, which is not an easy task to achieve.
- It would be good to have a static type system like Rust, which eliminates the risk of runtime errors, even if code complexity increases.
- Traits are useful for defining methods, but they can increase code size and require inlining code, whereas static types provide faster and more precise code.
- The team is working hard to make ICU4X a strong competitor to other libraries, particularly ICU4C, and ensure that it can provide the features and functionality needed by internationalization.
- Another key concept is the use of Unicode and its properties, such as case-sensitivity, folding, and equivalence classes, for text processing, which ensures that the same sequence of codepoints can be interpreted differently across different locales and languages.
- Using Rust also allows for the ability to create modules that are memory-safe, which allows for more predictable code execution and fewer opportunities for bugs or security vulnerabilities to occur.
- ICU4X and ICU4C are designed differently, with ICU4X being modular and focused on code size reduction, whereas ICU4C is focused on performance.
- The way ICU4X and ICU4C handle locales is also different, with ICU4X using Unicode CLDR to handle date and time formatting, which is designed to be more human-readable than other formats.
- When it comes to formatting dates, it’s the locale that determines which algorithm to use to format the date.