Unicode guide/Implementations
This page is my attempt to document my research on unique Unicode implementations supported in various languages and software. This is mostly in note form to avoid things getting out of control.
I apologize for not attaching sources to all of this, I've had to dig in to the source code. My best advice here it to
C and C++
- C/C++ unicode
Support varies according to platform, see the POSIX and Windows sections below.
POSIX
I'm not going to address wide characters because they have the same issues.
- Character type: Byte, encoding not defined
- Bytestrings: Yes, as arrays
- Internal encoding: None
- String encoding: Locale-dependant, ASCII-compatible
- Supports bytes in strings: Depends on locale encoding
- Supports surrogates in strings: Depends on locale encoding
- Supports invalid code points in strings: Depends on locale encoding
- Supports normalizing strings: No
- Supports querying code point properties: No
- Supports breaking by code point: No
- Supports breaking by extended grapheme cluster: No
- Supports breaking by text boundaries: No
- Supports encoding and decoding to other encodings: Yes
- Supports Unicode regex extensions: No
- Classifies by: Locale information, only supports 8-bit characters
- Collates by: Locale information, supports arbitrary strings
- Converts case by: Locale information, only supports 8-bit characters
- Locale tailoring is done by: Per-thread POSIX locale
This could be classified as 'Unicode agnostic' however classification and case conversion is limited to 8-bit characters. As a result this is just broken even with the limited functionality it provides.
Lua
Lua describes itself as 'encoding-agnostic', whatever that is.
- Character type: Byte, encoding not defined
- Bytestrings: No
- Internal encoding: None
- String encoding: Undefined
- Supports bytes in strings: Depends on encoding
- Supports surrogates in strings: Depends on encoding
- Supports invalid code points in strings: Depends on encoding
- Supports normalizing strings: No
- Supports querying code point properties: No
- Supports breaking by code point: Yes if encoded in UTF-8
- Supports breaking by extended grapheme cluster: No
- Supports breaking by text boundaries: No
- Supports encoding and decoding to other encodings: No
- Supports Unicode regex extensions: Not applicable, no regex at all
- Classifies by: C APIs, maybe by locale, only supports 8-bit characters
- Collates by: Doesn't provide an API for this
- Converts case by: C APIs, maybe by locale, only supports 8-bit characters
- Locale tailoring is done by: Per-process C locale
Bonus points for the string.reverse function that will break Unicode strings.
Windows
- wide APIs
Rust
Java
Swift
Go
Kotlin
Python
python 2
python 3
Tcl
Squirrel
Perl
Ruby
Zig
Elixir
- erlang too?
Raku
Haskell
PHP
- narrow APIs
- mbstring