Re: [Chicken-hackers] CR #1142 and upcoming changes

[Felix Winkelmann]

From: Peter Bex <address@hidden>
Subject: Re: [Chicken-hackers] CR #1142 and upcoming changes
Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2014 10:02:51 +0200

> On Wed, Aug 20, 2014 at 11:59:58AM +0400, Yaroslav Tsarko wrote:
>> On 19.08.2014 19:24, Felix Winkelmann wrote:
>> >
>> >Sounds like a good first step, even though I personally would prefer
>> >UCS-4 strings (constant lookup + modification and so on). But that
>> >seems to be unpopular, AFAICT...
>> 
>> Wouldn`t that be possible to specify which internal string encoding is 
>> used by the core as a CHICKEN build-time option? For embedded systems 
>> with limited resources that will give a decent leverage to choose from - 
>> either consume more memory but more fast lookups etc (in the case of 
>> UCS-4) or consume less memory by the cost of UTF-8 conversions on the 
>> fly during string operations.
> 
> I think it would be possible, but I dislike the idea because it is hard
> to maintain two separate compilation options like that.

Well, actually we might as well support several: ASCII/Latin-1, UTF-8
and UCS-2/UCS-4. Without UTF-8 it would just be a variable
element-size option. But I agree that this doesn't make maintenance
any easier... Let's think some more about this. We don't have to
decide right now.


felix