The One True Unicode Way
Summary
OCaml does not support Unicode out of the box and it seems quite likely that this will not happen in the discernable future. Rather, the preferred way of manipulating Unicode is through external libraries and, if necessary, Camlp4 extensions.
At the moment, there are at least four ways of managing Unicode in OCaml:
- Camomile is a Unicode library
- ExtLib offers some Unicode support
- ULex has its own Unicode support.
- LablGTK gives access to the Glib/GTK+ Unicode
These three libraries are incompatible. The objective of this discussion is to decide on one library to use and consider standard, so as to be able to focus efforts on one manner of managing Unicode.
The questions
- Which Unicode library should be considered standard ?
- What efforts should we put into improving Unicode support ?
Express yourselves here
- I am not sure we have to choose a library over another. Rather, we should use the experience gained with these three libraries to decide what is the best way to represent unicode strings in OCaml. Many libraries may exist as long as they are interoperable.
- BTW, how about to make unicode strings immutable?