Hey everyone,
In the past we needed ICU4J so Eclipse can support latest Unicode. But with the new JVM cadence Java supports ICU4J pretty much at the same time the JVM does. Keeping uptodate icu4j requires work in Orbit to get it integrated (and used to be non-trivial but this is hopefully improved now).
Considering that we are not doing very good work in keeping uptodate icu4j (master has 64.2 while latest is 65.1) we may even face a case where using icu4j is holding off people that run on latest JVM from proper Unicode support. Although, I don't believe that there is anything added in either JVM or ICU4J that is of any practical use for us. Reading
http://site.icu-project.org/home/why-use-icu4j most of the reasons to use it are for pre Java 6.
I questioned the need for it after discussion with
JDT.LS people what/why is it needed as it needlessly add 13MB which is huge size when deployed to thousands of containers. Eclipse RCP apps face the same issue for sure.
So do we still need for something or we can start phasing it out ?
P.S. I know that would be probably 2 years of effort.
--
Alexander Kurtakov
Red Hat Eclipse Team
