ICU4X 0.4 Released

Unicode® ICU4X 0.4 has just been released. This revision brings an implementation of Unicode Properties, major performance and memory improvements for DateTimeFormat, and extends the data provider data loading models with BlobDataProvider.

ICU4X 0.4 also adds initial time zone support in DateTimeFormat, week of month/year, iteration APIs in Segmenter and experimental ListFormatter.

The ICU4X team is shifting to work on the 0.5 release in accordance with the roadmap and a product requirements document setting sights on a stable 1.0 release in Q2 2022.

ICU4X aims to develop a highly modular set of internationalization components for resource-constrained environments, portable across programming languages.

Multiple early adopters use ICU4X in pre-release software in Rust, C, C++, and WebAssembly. The team is ready to onboard additional early adopters to refine the APIs, build processes, and feature sets before the 1.0 release. The team is also looking for contributors to write code generation for additional target programming languages. For more information, please open a discussion on the ICU4X GitHub.

For details, please see the changelog.

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Over 144,000 characters are available for adoption to help the Unicode Consortium’s work on digitally disadvantaged languages

ICU4X 0.2 Released

Unicode® ICU4X 0.2 has just been released. This revision improves completeness of the components in ICU4X 0.1 and introduces a number of lower-level utilities.

ICU4X 0.2 adds minimal decimal formatting, time zone formatting, datetime skeleton resolution, and locale canonicalization.

This release comes with new low-level utilities for fixed decimal operations, ICU patterns, and foundational components allowing use of ICU4X from other ecosystems via Foreign Function Interfaces.

Additionally, the ICU4X team released a roadmap and a product requirements document setting sights on a stable 1.0 release.

ICU4X aims to develop a highly modular set of internationalization components for resource-constrained environments.

For details, please see changelog.

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Over 140,000 characters are available for adoption to help the Unicode Consortium’s work on digitally disadvantaged languages

Announcing ICU4X 0.1

We are thrilled to announce the first pre-release version of the ICU4X internationalization components. ICU4X aims to provide high quality internationalization components with a focus on:

• Modularity
• Flexible data management
• Performance, memory, safety and size
• Universal access from programming languages and ecosystems (FFI)

ICU4X draws from the experience of projects such as ICU4C, ICU4J, ECMA-402, CLDR, and Unicode.

Target

ICU4X is initially focusing on a subset of internationalization APIs standardized in ECMA-402 in order to cover the needs of client-side ecosystems and thin clients.

ICU4X targets a wide range of programming languages and environments, aiming to expose its APIs to languages such as Javascript, WebAssembly, Dart, C++, Python, PHP, and others.

With our focus on client-side ecosystems a lot of effort will be placed on minimizing the size, memory, and CPU utilization, and allowing for asynchronous data management.

More information on the design can be found in the project’s Announcement article.

Status

This first pre-release 0.1 version is written in Rust and introduces a small subset of APIs and scaffolding for flexible data management.

We would like to invite everyone to try it out. Take a look at the documentation and provide feedback on the API design. We’re also looking for feedback on the algorithms and data structures we use, especially from contributors with experience in Rust and ICU algorithms

More information on the release can be found in the Release Notes.

Roadmap

The next version, 0.2, will focus on validating the ability to expose ICU4X APIs to other programming environments and extending the data management system to be asynchronous.

The project is fully open source and invites all interested parties to join the effort of designing and developing a modular internationalization components system in Rust.

To learn more on how to contribute to the project, visit the CONTRIBUTE document in the project’s repository.

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Over 140,000 characters are available for adoption to help the Unicode Consortium’s work on digitally disadvantaged languages