| > Of course it does. Many software users are stuck on multiple-year-old toolchains for various reasons, yet these systems still need to be able to handle unicode properly. So? Use the external library then. One thing does not preclude the other. > No, they cannot. Many users are stuck in older windows versions, linux versions, LTS linux versions, etc. because of their organization or their clients requirements. I work in such an organization and no, we cannot use third-party packages. The same way we cannot update our toolchain. So in most cases the point is moot. > These updates would only apply to newer Rust toolchains, that many users cannot use. Unless you are suggesting the release of patch versions for the soon to be 100 old Rust toolchains in existence every time the unicode standard is updated. You can provide standard Unicode handling that is good enough for 99% software out there. If you need to be on the bleeding edge, then use the bleeding edge library or rustc. It is pretty simple, actually! |
That's what everybody already does? You are proposing to, instead of doing that, move that library into the standard library where it cannot ever change.
> You can provide standard Unicode handling that is good enough for 99% software out there.
That's already in std? 99% of the code doesn't need to handle unicode grapheme clusters, because it doesn't deal with unicode at all.
You are suggesting moving something into standard that would make unicode software harder to update, and would make the standard library huge (>20mb larger) for all programs (the unicode tables take a lot of binary size), even those that don't use unicode, to try to solve a problem that does not exist.
> I work in such an organization and no, we cannot use third-party packages
If a Rust user cannot write `cargo add unicode-segmentation`, they have bigger problems than not being able to handle grapheme clusters. You can't run async code because you don't have an executor, you can't do http because the standard library doesn't support that, you can't solve partial differential equations, or do machine learning, or pretty much anything interesting with Rust.
That's bad for you, but the solution isn't to make Rust bad for everybody else instead.
If your organization doesn't let you use third-party packages, then write your own: that's what your organization wants you to do.
Some organizations want all code in CamelCase, they can't use the standard library at all. But the solution isn't to make Rust case insensitive, or to prove a 2nd standard library API for those organizations.