At first, I was thinking of reverting most of that patch, and even wrote the log and committed (locally) the result.[1] But then I thought "What systems would suffer if I didn't?" Only, shall we say, "challenged" systems would suffer the added overhead. Overhead that is as yet only theoretical/planned and of course unmeasured.
To be honest, I had the same concern... My thought was, if they were the same, Bruno would have deprecated locale_charset or noted that it is a lighter-weight alternative. However, they are not the same apparently, so (while appreciating the bugfixes that came out of this experiment) I'd revert it and withdraw my patch to regex that went on top of this one.
Paolo
