Re: [Bug-zile] Adding Unicode support

[Reuben Thomas]

On 30 March 2014 15:40, Garnaik Sumeet <address@hidden> wrote:

Hi Gary,

An interesting recent development is that Lua 5.3 (work 2) was released today, with basic unicode support.

In the interests of forward compatibility, we might want to compare Roberto's unicode API with the starwing utf8 module and see whether it's possible to abstract the starwing API in the 5.3 calls...

The utf-8 api in Lua 5.3 is sufficient but is not extensive as that of starwing utf-8. We will have to do almost the same work as starwing utf-8 except that we have few functions provided by Lua to ease some of our work. I suggest we go with the starwing api for support in Lua 5.2 and above unless we are planning to develop a utf8 library for Lua 5.3 using the Lua utf8 api.

In the past we have tried to keep compatibility with 5.1 and 5.2, and ran into problems. I think that for an application or framework, such as Zile, it's less important to keep multi-version compatibility than for a library. Hence, especially as Zile is still "new" in the sense that other people are not using the Lua code (as far as I know), it would make sense to me to concentrate on Lua 5.3 compatibility, as soon as it becomes alpha (so that the API is pretty much guaranteed).

This implies that a higher-level API built on Lua 5.3's UTF-8 library is needed, and it would seem sensible to keep the starwing API, unless there's a reason to change it. In other words, the task as far as UTF-8 is concerned becomes "port starwing to Lua 5.3 when Lua 5.3 becomes alpha".

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