Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> One idea I've had for a while was to have a universal string type:
>
> struct UString {
> union {
> char[] utf8;
> wchar[] utf16;
> dchar[] utf32;
> }
> enum Discriminator { utf8, utf16, utf32 };
> Discriminator kind;
> IntervalTree!(size_t) skip;
> ...
> }
>
> The IntervalTree stores the skip amounts that must be added for a given
> index in the string. For ASCII strings that would be null. Then its size
> grows with the number of multibyte characters. Beyond a threshold,
> representation is transparently switched to utf16 or utf32 as needed and
> the tree becomes smaller or null again.
Although I see some potential in a universal string type, I don't think
this is the right implementation strategy. I'd rather have my short
strings in utf-32 (optimized for speed) and my long strings in
utf-8/utf-16 (optimized for memory usage).
--
Rainer Deyke - rain...@eldwood.com
