Re: ICU4D

Do you know which parts of ICU do you need?  Some parts of ICU, such as 
character properties which you mention, are written in C and the C++ 
api in ICU is just a wrapper.

I would think that to avoid maintenance and forks whenever ICU code 
changes, that you would want to write thin D object wrappers for ICU 
calling to the C apis.  Obviously this could be evaluated on a per 
service basis.    If you have inline expansion the wrappers could end 
up being very thin at run time.

See the readme (with the source) and userguide for some items on 
organization and porting issues.

hope this helps,
-s

On 25-Awi-2004, at 11:06 AM, [email protected] wrote:
> Hi,
>  
> I just joined this group. I want to port ICU to D. D is a programming 
> language which supports a garbage collector, like Java, but which 
> generates executables, like C++. Information about D can be found at 
> http://www.digitalmars.com/d. I post in the D forum under the alias 
> "Arcane Jill".
>  
> We've been talking about internationalization for a while in the D 
> community. I wrote a library for D which accesses Unicode character 
> properties, and was about to move on to the more complex algorithms, 
> when I discovered ICU. D is link-compatible with C, so we /could/ plug 
> into ICU's C API with not too much hassle, but D is object 
> oriented, has a class heirarchy, a garbage collector, and so on, and 
> it would be dumb to throw all that away just to use a C API. A better 
> tactic would be to port ICU to D. (D is probably closer to Java than 
> to C++, because classes are passed by reference, and because the 
> presence of the garbage collector means that D programmers are 
> unaccustomed to having to type "delete".)
>  
> What's the best way of going about this?
> Jill