Re: New subscriber: redesign of Unicode character tables (GLib)

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Wed, 2008-07-23 at 22:38 +0100, adrian.dmc wrote:
> Hi, I'm new here...
> 
> My objective, for now, its to rework the Unicode support of GLib by
> redesigning its character tables, specially its size.
> I'll appreciate some guidelines and suggestion ("Give up!!" included).
> 
> I'm currently reading/analyzing the Unicode Standard 5.1 and the GLib
> support for Unicode to later propose the redesign.

The Unicode tables in GLib were designed with a lot of attention to:

 - Minimizing size
 - Keeping lookups fast
 - Keeping data static and shared between multiple applications
 - Minimizing relocations

(The second two are closely related.) 

If you have weird application requirements (disk space is much more
expensive than RAM say), doing things like gzip compressing the data
tables would work.

Otherwise, I would basically say "give up". I don't think it's a project
where you'll get of traction easily... I'm sure it's possible to make
some increment improvements if you are smart enough or persistent
enough, but it won't be easy.

Feel free to prove me wrong :-)

- Owen