Hello! Ndeewo! Molweni! Салам!  Across the world, people are coming online with smartphones, smart watches, and other small, low-resource devices

The Unicode Blog: Announcing ICU4X 1.0

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2022-09-29 20:00:20

Hello! Ndeewo! Molweni! Салам! Across the world, people are coming online with smartphones, smart watches, and other small, low-resource devices. The technology industry needs an internationalization solution for these environments that scales to dozens of programming languages and thousands of human languages.

Enter ICU4X. As the name suggests, ICU4X is an offshoot of the industry-standard i18n library published by the Unicode Consortium, ICU (International Components for Unicode), which is embedded in every major device and operating system.

This week, after 2½ years of work by Google, Mozilla, Amazon, and community partners, the Unicode Consortium has published ICU4X 1.0, its first stable release. Built from the ground up to be lightweight , portable , and secure , ICU4X learns from decades of experience to bring localized date formatting, number formatting, collation, text segmentation, and more to devices that, until now, did not have a suitable solution.

Lightweight: ICU4X is Unicode's first library to support static data slicing and dynamic data loading. With ICU4X, clients can inspect their compiled code to easily build small, optimized locale data packs and then load those data packs on the fly, enabling applications to scale to more languages than ever before. Even when platform i18n is available, ICU4X is suitable as a polyfill to add additional features or languages. It does this while using very little RAM and CPU, helping extend devices' battery life.

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