50% of statically linked perl consists of Encode!
Side note: I still think, Encode should have used the encoding tables
that are already provided by the operating system where available. For
In an ideal world, yes, maybe. When the same tables would be
available for all (well, 90% is good enough) platforms Perl runs on,
then, maybe.
example on Linux, the iconv() function with glibc 2.2 or newer does
already provide access to all the necessary tables. I observe at the
moment, that almost a dozen different programming language communities
reinvent the recoding wheel simultaneously and independently, even
This is true, sad, but I think still unavoidable at this point in
time. In five years I would expect something to be widely accepted
and used, such as libiconv (which does look really promising). But it
is not enough for Perl's Unicode/encoding support to work in Linux and
Solaris only... just as a reminder, here is the list of "common"
(read as: at least somewhat actively supported) Perl platforms:
AIX AmigaOS BeOS Darwin DG/UX DOS DJGPP DYNIX/ptx
EPOC R5 FreeBSD HP-UX IRIX Linux MachTen MacOS Classic
NonStop-UX ReliantUNIX OpenBSD OpenVMS OS/2 OS X QNX
Solaris Tru64 UNIX UNICOS UNICOS/mk VOS Win32/NT/2K
(and there's about the same number of less common ones)
When libiconv works (so that Perl could can just include it) and/or
comes standard with the majority of the above, then we can consider
it. Saying: "oh, your platform does not support encoding
transformations because you do not have glibc 2.2" is not an option.
though portable C libraries such as libiconv are already available for
exactly the same purpose.
--
$jhi++; # http://www.iki.fi/jhi/
# There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'.
# It is 'dead'. -- Jack Cohen
